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ADVENTURES WHILE PREACHING 
THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 



BY VACHEL LINDSAY 

THE CONGO AND OTHER POEMS 

GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH 
ENTERS INTO HEAVEN 

THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 

ADVENTURES WHILE PREACHING 
THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 



ADVENTURES WHILE PREACHING 
THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 



VACHEL LINDSAY 



NEW YORK 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1921 



COPYRIGHT 1914 BY 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 






2-3 



Printed in America 



Dedicated to 
Miss Sara Teasdale 



Thanks are due the Crowell Publishing 
Company for permission to reprint the proc- 
lamations from Farm and Fireside with 
which the book ends. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. I START ON MY WALK 9 

II. WALKING THROUGH MISSOURI 36 

III. WALKING INTO KANSAS 62 

IV. IN KANSAS: THE FIRST HARVEST 101 

V. IN KANSAS: THE SECOND AND THIRD HARVEST 127 

VI. THE END OF THE ROAD; MOONSHINE; AND SOME 

PROCLAMATIONS 154) 



Adventures While Preach- 
ing the Gospel of Beauty 



I Start on My Walk 

\ S some of the readers of this account are 
aware, I took a walk last summer from 
my home town, Springfield, Illinois, across 
Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, up and down 
Colorado and into New Mexico. One of the 
most vivid little episodes of the trip, that 
came after two months of walking, I would 
like to tell at this point. It was in southern 
Colorado. It was early morning. Around 
the cliff, with a boom, a rattle and a bang, 
appeared a gypsy wagon. On the front seat 
was a Romany, himself dressed inconspicu- 
ously, but with his woman more bedecked 

9 



10 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

than Carmen. She wore the bangles and 
spangles of her Hindu progenitors. The 
woman began to shout at me, I could not 
distinguish just what. The two seemed to 
think this was the gayest morning the sun 
ever shone upon. They came faster and 
faster, then, suddenly, at the woman's sug- 
gestion, pulled up short. And she asked me 
with a fraternal, confidential air, "What you 
sellin', what you sellin', boy?" 

If we had met on the first of June, when 
I had just started, she would have pretended 
to know all about me, she would have asked 
to tell my fortune. On the first of June I 
wore about the same costume I wear on the 
streets of Springfield. I was white as paper 
from two years of writing poetry indoors. 
Now, on the first of August I was sun- 
burned a quarter of an inch deep. My cos- 
tume, once so respectable, I had gradually 
transformed till it looked like that of a show- 
man. I wore very yellow corduroys, a fancy 
sombrero and an oriflamme tie. So Mrs. 



I START ON MY WALK 11 

Gypsy hailed me as a brother. She eyed 
my little worn-out oil-cloth pack. It was a 
delightful professional mystery to her. 

I handed up a sample of what it contained 
— my Gospel of Beauty (a little one-page 
formula for making America lovelier) , and 
my little booklet, Rhymes to Be Traded for 
Bread. 

The impatient horses went charging on. 
In an instant came more noises. Four more 
happy gypsy wagons passed. Each time 
the interview was repeated in identical lan- 
guage, and with the same stage business. 
The men were so silent and masterful-look- 
ing, the girls such brilliant, inquisitive cats! 
I never before saw anything so like high- 
class comic opera off the stage, and in fancy 
I still see it all: — those brown, braceleted 
arms still waving, and those provocative 
siren cries : — "What you sellin', boy? What 
you sellin'?" 

I hope my Gospel did them good. Its 
essential principle is that one should not be 



12 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

a gypsy forever. He should return home. 
Having returned, he should plant the seeds 
of Art and of Beauty. He should tend them 
till they grow. There is something essen- 
tially humorous about a man walking rapid- 
ly away from his home town to tell all men 
they should go back to their birthplaces. It 
is still more humorous that, when I finally 
did return home, it was sooner than I in- 
tended, all through a temporary loss of 
nerve. But once home I have taken my own 
advice to heart. I have addressed four 
mothers' clubs, one literary club, two mis- 
sionary societies and one High School De- 
bating Society upon the Gospel of Beauty. 
And the end is not yet. No, not by any 
means. As John Paul Jones once said, "I 
have not yet begun to fight." 

I had set certain rules of travel, evolved 
and proved practicable in previous expe- 
ditions in the East and South. These rules 
had been published in various periodicals be- 
fore my start. The home town newspapers, 



I START ON MY WALK 13 

my puzzled but faithful friends in good 
times and in bad, went the magazines one 
better and added a rule or so. To promote 
the gala character of the occasion, a certain 
paper announced that I was to walk in a 
Roman toga with bare feet encased in san- 
dals. Another added that I had travelled 
through most of the countries of Europe in 
this manner. It made delightful reading. 
Scores of mere acquaintances crossed the 
street to shake hands with me on the strength 
of it. 

The actual rules were to have nothing to 
do with cities, railroads, money, baggage or 
fellow tramps. I was to begin to ask for 
dinner about a quarter of eleven and for 
supper, lodging and breakfast about a quar- 
ter of five. I was to be neat, truthful, civil 
and on the square. I was to preach the Gos- 
pel of Beauty. How did these rules work 
out? 

The cities were easy to let alone. I 
passed quickly through Hannibal and Jef- 



14 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

ferson City. Then, straight West, it was 
nothing but villages and farms till the three 
main cities of Colorado. Then nothing but 
desert to central New Mexico. I did not 
take the train till I reached central New 
Mexico, nor did I write to Springfield for 
money till I quit the whole game at that 
point. 

Such wages as I made I sent home, start- 
ing out broke again, first spending just 
enough for one day's recuperation out of 
each pile, and, in the first case, rehabilitating 
my costume considerably. I always walked 
penniless. My baggage was practically nil. 
It was mainly printed matter, renewed by 
mail. Sometimes I carried reproductions of 
drawings of mine, The Village Improve- 
ment Parade, a series of picture-cartoons 
with many morals. 

I pinned this on the farmers' walls, ex- 
plaining the mottoes on the banners, and ex- 
horting them to study it at their leisure. My 
little pack had a supply of the aforesaid 



I START ON MY WALK 15 

Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread. And it 
contained the following Gospel of Beauty: 

THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Being the new "creed of a beggar 3 ' by 
that vain and foolish mendicant Nicholas 
Vachel Lindsay, printed for his personal 
friends in his home village — Springfield, 
Illinois. It is his intention to carry this^gos- 
pel across the country beginning June, 1912, 
returning in due time. 



I come to you penniless and afoot, to bring 
a message. I am starting a new religious 
idea. The idea does not say "no" to any 
creed that you have heard. . . . After 
this, let the denomination to which you now 
belong be called in your heart "the church 
of beauty" or "the church of the open shy" 
. . . The church of beauty has two sides: 
the love of beauty and the love of God. 



16 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

II 

THE NEW LOCALISM 

The things most worth while are one's 
own hearth and neighborhood. We should 
make our own home and neighborhood the 
most democratic j the most beautiful and the 
holiest in the world. The children now 
growing up should become devout garden- 
ers or architects or park architects or teach- 
ers of dancing in the Greek spirit or musi- 
cians or novelists or poets or story-writers or 
craftsmen or wood-carvers or dramatists or 
actors or singers. They should find their 
talent and nurse it industriously. They 
should believe in every possible application 
to art-theory of the thoughts of the Declara- 
tion of Independence and Lincoln's Gettys- 
burg Address. They should, if led by the 
spirit j, wander over the whole nation in 
search of the secret of democratic beauty 
with their hearts at the same time filled to 



I START ON MY WALK 17 

overflowing with the righteousness of God. 
Then they should come bach to their own 
hearth and neighborhood and gather a little 
circle of their own sort of workers about 
them and strive to make the neighborhood 
and home more beautiful and democratic 
and holy with their special art. . . . 
They should labor in their little circle expect- 
ing neither reward nor honors. . . . In 
their darkest hours they should be made 
strong by the vision of a completely beau- 
tiful neighborhood and the passion for a 
completely democratic art. Their reason 
for living should be that joy in beauty 
which no wounds can take away, and that 
joy in the love of God which no crucifixion 
can end. 

The kindly reader at this point clutches 
his brow and asks, "But why carry this paper 
around? Why, in Heaven's name, do it as 
a beggar? Why do it at all?" 

Let me make haste to say that there has 



18 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

been as yet no accredited, accepted way for 
establishing Beauty in the heart of the aver- 
age American. Until such a way has been 
determined upon by a competent committee, 
I must be pardoned for taking my own 
course and trying any experiment I please. 

But I hope to justify the space occupied 
by this narrative, not by the essential seri- 
ousness of my intentions, nor the essential 
solemnity of my motley cloak, nor by the 
final failure or success of the trip, but by 
the things I unexpectedly ran into, as curi- 
ous to me as to the gentle and sheltered 
reader. Of all that I saw the State of Kan- 
sas impressed me most, and the letters home 
I have chosen cover, for the most part, ad- 
ventures there. 

Kansas, the Ideal American Community! 
Kansas, nearer than any other to the kind 
of a land our fathers took for granted! 
Kansas, practically free from cities and in- 
dustrialism, the real last refuge of the con- 
stitution, since it maintains the type of agri- 



I START ON MY WALK 19 

cultural civilization the constitution had in 
mind! Kansas, State of tremendous crops 
and hardy, devout, natural men! Kansas 
of the historic Santa Fe Trail and the classic 
village of Emporia and the immortal editor 
of Emporia! Kansas, laid out in roads a 
mile apart, criss-crossing to make a great 
checker-board, roads that go on and on past 
endless rich farms and big farm-houses, 
though there is not a village or railroad for 
miles ! Kansas, the land of the real country 
gentlemen, Americans who work the soil and 
own the soil they work; State where the 
shabby tenant- dwelling scarce appears as 
yet ! Kansas of the Chautauqua and the col- 
lege student and the devout school-teacher! 
The dry State, the automobile State, the in- 
surgent State ! Kansas, that is ruled by the 
cross-roads church, and the church type of 
civilization! The Newest New England! 
State of more promise of permanent spirit- 
ual glory than Massachusetts in her brilliant 
youth ! 



20 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Travellers who go through in cars with 
roofs know little of this State. Kansas is 
not Kansas till we march day after day, 
away from the sunrise, under the blistering 
noon sky, on, on over a straight west-going 
road toward the sunset. Then we begin to 
have our spirits stirred by the sight of the 
tremendous clouds looming over the most in- 
terminable plain that ever expanded and 
made glorious the heart of Man. 

I have walked in eastern Kansas where 
the hedged fields and the orchards and gar- 
dens reminded one of the picturesque sec- 
tions of Indiana, of antique and settled 
Ohio. Later I have mounted a little hill on 
what was otherwise a level and seemingly un- 
inhabited universe, and traced, away to the 
left, the creeping Arkansas, its course 
marked by the cottonwoods, that became 
like tufts of grass on its far borders. All 
the rest of the world was treeless and river- 
less, yet green from the rain of yesterday, 
and patterned like a carpet with the shadows 



I START ON MY WALK 21 

of the clouds. I have walked on and on 
across this unbroken prairie-sod where half- 
wild cattle grazed. Later I have marched 
between alfalfa fields where hovered the lav- 
ender haze of the fragrant blossom, and have 
heard the busy music of the gorging bumble 
bees. Later I have marched for days and 
days with wheat waving round me, yellow 
as the sun. Many's the night I have slept in 
the barn-lofts of Kansas with the wide loft- 
door rolled open and the inconsequential 
golden moon for my friend. 

These selections from letters home tell 
how I came into Kansas and how I adven- 
tured there. The letters were written avow- 
edly as a sort of diary of the trip, but their 
contents turned out to be something less than 
that, something more than that, and some- 
thing rather different. 

Thursday, May 30, 1912. In the blue 
grass by the side of the road. Somewhere 
west of Jacksonville, Illinois. Hot sun. 



22 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Cool wind. Rabbits in the distance. Bum- 
blebees near. 

At five last evening I sighted my lodging 
for the night. It was the other side of a 
high worm fence. It was down in the hol- 
low of a grove. It was the box of an old 
box-car, brought there somehow, without its 
wheels. It was far from a railroad. I said 
in my heart "Here is the appointed shelter." 
I was not mistaken. 

As was subsequently revealed, it belonged 
to the old gentleman I spied through the 
window stemming gooseberries and singing : 
"John Brown's body." He puts the car top 
on wagon wheels and hauls it from grove to 
grove between Jacksonville and the east 
bank of the Mississippi. He carries a saw 
mill equipment along. He is clearing this 
wood for the owner, of all but its walnut 
trees. He lives in the box with his son and 
two assistants. He is cook, washerwoman 
and saw-mill boss. His wife died many- 
years ago. 



I START ON MY WALK 23 

The old gentleman let me in with alac- 
rity. He allowed me to stem gooseberries 
while he made a great supper for the boys. 
They soon came in. I was meanwhile as- 
sured that my name was going into the pot. 
My host looked like his old general, McClel- 
lan. He was eloquent on the sins of 
preachers, dry voters and pension reformers. 
He was full of reminiscences of the string 
band at Sherman's headquarters, in which 
he learned to perfect himself on his wonder- 
ful fiddle. He said, "I can't play slow mu- 
sic. I've got to play dance tunes or die." 
He did not die. His son took a banjo from 
an old trunk and the two of them gave us 
every worth while tune on earth: Money 
Musk, HelVs Broke Loose in Georgia, The 
Year of Jubilee, Sailor's Hornpipe, Baby 
on the Block, Lady on the Lake, and The 
Irish Washerwoman, while I stemmed goose- 
berries, which they protested I did not need 
to do. Then I read my own unworthy 
verses to the romantic and violin-stirred 



24 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

company. And there was room for all of 
us to sleep in that one repentant and con- 
verted box-car. 

Friday, May 31, 1912. Half an horn- 
after a dinner of crackers, cheese and raisins, 
provided at my solicitation by the grocer in 
the general store and post-office, Valley 
City, Illinois. 

I have thought of a new way of stating 
my economic position. I belong to one of 
the leisure classes, that of the rhymers. In 
order to belong to any leisure class, one must 
be a thief or a beggar. On the whole I pre- 
fer to be a beggar, and, before each meal, 
receive from toiling man new permission to 
extend my holiday. The great business of 
that world that looms above the workshop 
and the furrow is to take things from people 
by some sort of taxation or tariff or special 
privilege. But I want to exercise my covet- 
ousness only in a retail way, open and above 
board, and when I take bread from a man's 



I START ON MY WALK 25 

table I want to ask him for that particular 
piece of bread, as politely as I can. 

But this does not absolutely fit my life. 
For yesterday I ate several things without 
permission, for instance, in mid-morning I 
devoured all the cherries a man can hold. 
They were hanging from heavy, breaking 
branches that came way over the stone wall 
into the road. 

Another adventure. Early in the after- 
noon I found a brick farmhouse. It had a 
noble porch. There were marks of old- 
fashioned distinction in the trimmed hedges 
and flower-beds, and in the summer-houses. 
The side-yard and barn-lot were the cluck- 
ingest, buzzingest kind of places. There was 
not a human being in sight. I knocked and 
knocked on the doors. I wandered through 
all the sheds. I could look in through the 
unlocked screens and see every sign of pres- 
ent occupation. If I had chosen to enter I 
could have stolen the wash bowl or the baby- 
buggy or the baby's doll. The creamery 



26 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

was more tempting, with milk and butter 
and eggs, and freshly pulled taffy cut in 
squares. I took a little taffy. That is all 
I took, though the chickens were very so- 
cial and I could have eloped with several of 
them. The roses and peonies and geraniums 
were entrancing, and there was not a watch 
dog anywhere. Everything seemed to say 
"Enter in and possess!" 

I saw inside the last door where I knocked 
a crisp, sweet, simple dress on a chair. Ah, 
a sleeping beauty somewhere about ! 

I went away from that place. 

Sunday, June 1, 1912. By the side of 
the road, somewhere in Illinois. 

Last night I was dead tired. I hailed a 
man by the shed of a stationary engine. I 
asked him if I could sleep in the engine- 
shed all night, beginning right now. He 
said "Yes." But from five to six, he put me 
out of doors, on a pile of gunny sacks on 
the grass. There I slept while the ducks 



I START ON MY WALK 27 

quacked in my ears, and the autos whizzed 
over the bridge three feet away. My host 
was a one-legged man. In about an hour 
he came poking me with that crutch and that 
peg of his. He said "Come, and let me tell 
your fortune! I have been studying your 
physiognifry while you were asleep!" So 
we sat on a log by the edge of the pond. 
He said: "I am the Seventh Son of a Sev- 
enth Son. They call me the duck-pond di- 
viner. I forecast the weather for these 
parts. Every Sunday I have my corner for 
the week's weather in the paper here." Then 
he indulged in a good deal of the kind of 
talk one finds in the front of the almanac. 
He was a little round man with a pair of 
round, dull eyes, and a dull, round face, 
with a two weeks' beard upon it. He 
squinted up his eyes now. He was deliber- 
ate. Switch engines were going by. He 
paused to hail the engineers. Here is a part 
of what he finally said: "You are a Child 
of Destiny." He hesitated, for he wanted 



28 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

to be sure of the next point. "You were 
born in the month of S-e-p-t-e-m-b-e-r. 
Your preference is for a business like clerk- 
ing in a store. You are of a slow, pigmatic 
temperament, but I can see you are fastidi- 
ous about your eating. You do not use to- 
bacco. You are fond of sweets. You have 
been married twice. Your first wife died, 
and your second was divorced. You look 
like you would make a good spiritualist me- 
dium. If you don't let any black cats cross 
your track you will have good luck for the 
next three years." 

He hit it right twice. I am a Child of 
Destiny and I am fond of sweets. When a 
prophet hits it right on essentials like that, 
who would be critical? 

An old woman with a pipe in her mouth 
came down the railroad embankment look- 
ing for greens. He bawled at her "Git out 
of that." But on she came. When she was 
closer he said: "Them weeds is full of 
poison oak." She grunted, and kept work- 



I START ON MY WALK 29 

ing her way toward us, and with a belliger- 
ent swagger marched past us on into the 
engine-room, carrying a great mess of 
greens in her muddy hands. 

There was scarcely space in that little shed 
for the engine, and it was sticking out in 
several places. Yet it dawned on me that 
this was the wife of my host, that they kept 
house with that engine for the principal ar- 
ticle of furniture. Without a word of in- 
troduction or explanation she stood behind 
me and mumbled, "You need your supper, 
son. Come in." 

There was actually a side-room in that 
little box, a side room with a cot and a cup- 
board as well. On the floor was what was 
once a rug. But it had had a long kitchen 
history. She dipped a little unwashed bowl 
into a larger unwashed bowl, with an un- 
washed thumb doing its whole duty. She 
handed me a fuzzy, unwashed spoon and 
said with a note of real kindness, "Eat your 
supper, young man." She patted me on the 



80 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

shoulder with a sticky hand. Then she stood, 
looking at me fixedly. The woman had only 
half her wits. 

I suppose they kept that stew till it was 
used up, and then made another. I was a 
Child of Destiny, all right, and Destiny de- 
creed I should eat. I sat there trying to 
think of things to say to make agreeable con- 
versation, and postpone the inevitable. 
Finally I told her I wanted to be a little boy 
once more, and take my bowl and eat on the 
log by the pond in the presence of Nature. 

She maintained that genial silence which 
indicates a motherly sympathy. I left her 
smoking and smiling there. And like a little 
child that knows not the folly of waste, I 
slyly fed my supper to the ducks. 

At bedtime the old gentleman slept in his 
clothes on the cot in the kitchenette. He 
had the dog for a foot- warmer. There was 
a jar of yeast under the table. Every so 
often the old gentleman would call for the 
old lady to come and drive the ducks out, or 



I START ON MY WALK 31 

they would get the board off the jar. Ever 
and anon the ducks had a taste before the 
avenger arrived. 

On one side of the engine the old lady had 
piled gunny-sacks for my bed. That soft- 
ened the cement-floor foundation. Then she 
insisted on adding that elegant rug from 
the kitchen, to protect me from the fuzz on 
the sacks. She herself slept on a pile of ex- 
celsior with a bit of canvas atop. She kept 
a cat just by her cheek to keep her warm, 
and I have no doubt the pretty brute whis- 
pered things in her ear. Tabby was the one 
aristocratic, magical touch: — one of these 
golden coon-cats. 

The old lady's bed was on the floor, just 
around the corner from me, on the other side 
of the engine. That engine stretched its 
vast bulk between us. It was as the sword 
between the duke and the queen in the fairy 
story. But every so often, in response to 
the old gentleman's alarm, the queen would 
come climbing over my feet in order to get 



32 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

to the kitchen and drive out the ducks. 
From where I lay I could see through two 
doors to the night outside. I could watch 
the stealthy approach of the white and 
waddling marauders. Do not tell me a duck 
has no sense of humor. It was a great game 
of tag to them. It occurred as regularly as 
the half hours were reached. I could time 
the whole process by the ticking in my soul, 
while presumably asleep. And while wait- 
ing for them to come up I could see the pond 
and a star reflected in the pond, the star of 
my Destiny, no doubt. At last it began to 
rain. Despite considerations of fresh air, 
the door was shut, and soon everybody was 
asleep. 

The bed was not verminif erous. I dislike 
all jokes on such a theme, but in this case 
the issue must be met. It is the one thing 
the tramp wants to know about his bunk. 
That peril avoided, there is nothing to quar- 
rel about. Despite all the grotesquerie of 



I START ON MY WALK 33 

that night, I am grateful for a roof, and 
two gentle friends. 

Poor things ! Just like all the citizens of 
the twentieth century, petting and grooming 
machinery three times as smart as they are 
themselves. Such people should have en- 
gines to take care of them, instead of taking 
care of engines. There stood the sleek brute 
in its stall, absorbing all, giving nothing, 
pumping supplies only for its own caste; — ■ 
water to be fed to other engines. 

But seldom are keepers of engine-stables 
as unfortunate as these. The best they can 
get from the world is cruel laughter. Yet 
this woman, crippled in brain, her soul only 
half alive, this dull man, crippled in body, 
had God's gift of the liberal heart. If they 
are supremely absurd, so are all of us. We 
must include ourselves in the farce. These 
two, tottering through the dimness and vex- 
ation of our queer world, were willing the 
stranger should lean upon them. I say they 
had the good gift of the liberal heart. One 



34 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

thing was theirs to divide. That was a roof. 
They gave me my third and they helped me 
to hide from the rain. In the name of St. 
Francis I laid me down. May that saint of 
all saints be with them, and with all the 
gentle and innocent and weary and broken! 



UPON RETURNING TO THE COUNTRY 
ROAD 

Even the shrewd and bitter, 
Gnarled by the old world's greed, 
Cherished the stranger softly 
Seeing his utter need. 
Shelter and patient hearing, 
These were their gifts to him, 
To the minstrel chanting, begging, 
As the sunset-fire grew dim. 
The rich said "You are welcome." 

Yea, even the rich were good. 
How strange that in their feasting 
His songs were understood! 
The doors of the poor were open, 
The poor who had wandered too, 
Who had slept with ne'er a roof-tree 



I START ON MY WALK 35 

Under the wind and dew. 
The minds of the poor mere open, 
There dark mistrust was dead. 
They loved his wizard stories, 
They bought his rhymes with bread. 

Those were his days of glory, 
Of faith in his fellow-men. 
Therefore, to-day the singer 
Turns beggar once again. 



II 

Walking Through Missouri 

Tuesday Morning, June 4, 1912. In a 
hotel bedroom in Laddonia, Missouri. I oc- 
cupy this room without charge. 

Through the mercy of the gateman I 
crossed the Hannibal toll-bridge without 
paying fare, and the more enjoyed the 
pearly Mississippi in the evening twilight. 
Walking south of Hannibal next morning, 
Sunday, I was irresistibly reminded of Ken- 
tucky. It was the first real "pike" of my 
journey, — solid gravel, and everyone was 
exercising his racing pony in his racing cart, 
and giving me a ride down lovely avenues 
of trees. Here, as in dozens of other inter- 
esting "lifts" in Illinois, I had the driver's 
complete attention, recited The Gospel of 



THROUGH MISSOURI 37 

Beauty through a series of my more didactic 
rhymes till I was tired, and presented the 
Village Improvement Parade and the 
Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread and ex- 
horted the comradely driver to forget me 
never. One colored horseman hitched for- 
ward on the plank of his breaking-cart and 
gave me his seat. Then came quite a ride 
into New London. He asked, "So you goin' 
to walk west to the mountains and all 
around?" "Yes, if this colt don't break my 
neck, or I don't lose my nerve or get bitten 
by a dog or anything." "Will you walk 
back?" "Maybe so, maybe not." He pon- 
dered a while, then said, with the Bert Wil- 
liams manner, "You 11 ride bach. Mark my 
words, you'll ride back!" 

He asked a little later, "Goin' to harves' 
in Kansas?" I assured him I was not going 
to harvest in Kansas. He rolled his big white 
eyes at me: "What in the name of Uncle 
Hillbilly air you up to then?" 

In this case I could not present my tracts, 



38 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

for I was holding on to him for dear life. 
Just then he turned off my road. Getting 
out of the cart I nearly hung myself; and 
the colt was away again before I could say 
"Thank you." 

Yesterday I passed through what was 
mostly a flat prairie country, abounding in 
the Missouri mule. I met one man on horse- 
back driving before him an enormous speci- 
men tied head to head with a draught-horse. 
The mule was continually dragging his good- 
natured comrade into the ditch and being 
jerked out again. The mule is a perpetual 
inquisitor and experimenter. He followed 
me along the fence with the alertest curios- 
ity, when he was inside the field, yet meeting 
me in the road, he often showed deadly ter- 
ror. If he was a mule colt, following his 
mare mamma along the pike, I had to stand 
in the side lane or hide behind a tree till he 
went by, or else he would turn and run as 
if the very devil were after him. Then the 
farmer on the mare would have to pursue 



THROUGH MISSOURI 39 

him a considerable distance, and drive him 
back with cuss words. 'Tis sweet to stir up 
so much emotion, even in the breast of an 
animal. 

What do you suppose happened in New 
London? I approached what I thought a 
tiny Baptist chapel of whitewashed stone. 
Noting it was about sermon-time, and feel- 
ing like repenting, I walked in. Behold, the 
most harmoniously-colored Catholic shrine 
in the world! The sermon was being 
preached by the most gorgeously robed 
priest one could well conceive. The father 
went on to show how a vision of the Christ- 
child had appeared on the altar of a lax 
congregation in Spain. From that time 
those people, stricken with reverence and 
godly fear, put that church into repair, and 
the community became a true servant of the 
Lord. Infidels were converted, heretics 
were confounded. 

After the sermon came the climax of the 
mass, and from the choir loft above my head 



40 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

came the most passionate religious singing 
I ever heard in my life. The excellence of 
the whole worship, even to the preaching of 
visions, was a beautiful surprise. 

People do not open their eyes enough, 
neither their spiritual nor their physical eyes. 
They are not sensitive enough to loveliness 
either visible or by the pathway of visions. 
I wish every church in the world could see 
the Christ-child on the altar, every Metho- 
dist and Baptist as well as every Catholic 
congregation. 

With these thoughts I sat and listened 
while that woman soloist sang not only 
through the Mass, but the Benediction of 
the Blessed Sacrament as well. The whole 
surprise stands out like a blazing star in my 
memory. 

I say we do not see enough visions. I 
wish that, going out of the church door at 
noon, every worshipper in America could 
spiritually discern the Good St. Francis 
come down to our earth and singing of the 



THROUGH MISSOURI 41 

Sun. I wish that saint would return. I 
wish he would preach voluntary poverty to 
all the middle-class and wealthy folk of this 
land, with the power that once shook Eu- 
rope. 

Friday, June 7, 1912. In the mid-after- 
noon in the woods, many miles west of Jef- 
ferson City. I am sitting by a wild rose 
bush. I am looking down a long sunlit vista 
of trees. 

Wednesday evening, three miles from 
Fulton, Missouri, I encountered a terrific 
storm. I tried one farm-house just before 
the rain came down, but they would not let 
me in, not even into the barn. They said it 
was "not convenient." They said there was 
another place a little piece ahead, anyway. 
Pretty soon I was considerably rained upon. 
But the "other place" did not appear. Later 
the thunder and lightning were frightful. 
It seemed to me everything was being struck 
all around me: because of the sheer down- 



42 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

pour it became pitch dark. It seemed as 
though the very weight of the rain would 
beat me into the ground. Yet I felt that I 
needed the washing. The night before I 
enjoyed the kind of hospitality that makes 
one yearn for a bath. 

At last I saw a light ahead. I walked 
through more cataracts and reached it. 
Then I knocked at the door. I entered what 
revealed itself to be a negro cabin. Mine 
host was Uncle Remus himself, only a per- 
son of more delicacy and dignity. He ap- 
peared to be well preserved, though he was 
eighteen years old when the war broke out. 
He owns forty acres and more than one 
mule. His house was sweet and clean, all 
metal surfaces polished, all wood-work 
scrubbed white, all linen fresh laundered. 
He urged me to dry at his oven. It was a 
long process, taking much fuel. He al- 
lowed me to eat supper and breakfast with 
him and his family, which honor I scarcely 
deserved. The old man said grace standing 



THROUGH MISSOURI 43 

up. Then we sat down and he said another. 
The first was just family prayers. The sec- 
ond was thanksgiving for the meal. The 
table was so richly and delicately provided 
that within my heart I paraphrased the 
twenty-third Psalm, though I did not quote 
it out aloud: "Thou preparest a table before 
me in the presence of mine enemies" — 
(namely, the thunder and lightning, and the 
inhospitable white man!) . 

I hope to be rained on again if it brings 
me communion bread like that I ate with 
my black host. The conversation was about 
many things, but began religiously; how 
<e OV Master in the sky gave us everything 
here to take heer of, and said we mussent 
waste any of it." The wife was a mixture of 
charming diffidence and eagerness in offer- 
ing her opinion on these points of political 
economy and theology. 

After supper the old gentleman told me 
a sweet-singing field-bird I described was 
called the "Rachel-Jane." He had five chil- 



44 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

dren grown and away from home and one 
sleek first voter still under his roof. The 
old gentleman asked the inevitable question : 
"Goin' west harvestin'?" 

I said "No" again. Then I spread out 
and explained The Village Improvement 
Parade. This did not interest the family- 
much, but they would never have done with 
asking me questions about Lincoln. And 
the fact that I came from Lincoln's home 
town was plainly my chief distinction in their 
eyes. The best bed was provided for me, 
and warm water in which to bathe, and I 
slept the sleep of the clean and regenerated 
in snowy linen. Next morning the sun 
shone, and I walked the muddy roads as 
cheerfully as though they were the paths of 
Heaven. 

Sunday Morning., June 9, 1912. I am 
writing in the railroad station at Tipton, 
Missouri. 

A little while back a few people began 



THROUGH MISSOURI 45 

to ask me to work for my meals. I believe 
this is because the "genteel" appearance 
with which I started has become something 
else. My derby hat has been used for so 
many things, — to keep off a Noah's flood of 
rain, to catch cherries in, to fight bumble- 
bees, to cover my face while asleep, and keep 
away the vague terrors of the night, — that 
it is still a hat, but not quite in the mode. 
My face is baked by the sun and my hands 
are fried and stewed. My trousers are 
creased not in one place, but all over. These 
things made me look more like a person who, 
in the words of the conventional world, 
"ought to work" 

Having been requested to work once or 
twice, I immediately made it my custom to 
offer labor-power as a preliminary to the 
meal. I generally ask about five people be- 
fore I find the one who happens to be in a 
meal-giving mood. This kindly person, 
about two-thirds of the time, refuses to let 
me work. I insist and insist, but he says, 



46 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

"Aw, come in and eat anyway." The man 
who accepts my offer of work may let me 
cut weeds, or hoe corn or potatoes, but he 
generally shows me the woodpile and the 
axe. Even then every thud of that inevi- 
tably dull instrument seems to go through 
him. After five minutes he thinks I have 
worked an hour, and he comes to the porch 
and shouts: "Come in and get your din- 
ner." 

Assuming a meal is worth thirty-five 
cents, I have never yet worked out the worth 
of one, at day-laborer's wages. Very often 
I am called into the house three times before 
I come. Whether I work or not, the meals 
are big and good. Perhaps there is a little 
closer attention to The Gospel of Beauty, 
after three unheeded calls to dinner. 

After the kindling is split and the meal 
eaten and they lean back in their chairs, 
a-weary of their mirth, by one means or an- 
other I show them how I am knocking at 



THROUGH MISSOURI 47 

the door of the world with a dream in my 
hand. 

Because of the multitudes of tramps pour- 
ing west on the freight trains, — tramps I 
never see because I let freight cars alone, — 
night accommodations are not so easy to get 
as they were in my other walks in Pennsyl- 
vania and Georgia. I have not yet been 
forced to sleep under the stars, but each 
evening has been a scramble. There must 
be some better solution to this problem of a 
sleeping-place. 

The country hotel, if there is one around, 
is sometimes willing to take in the man who 
flatly says he is broke. For instance, the 
inn-keeper's wife at Clarksburg was ten- 
derly pitiful, yea, she was kind to me after 
the fashion of the holiest of the angels. 
There was a protracted meeting going on 
in the town. That was, perhaps, the reason 
for her exalted heart. But, whatever the 
reason, in this one case I was welcomed with 
such kindness and awe that I dared not lift 



48 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

up my haughty head or distribute my poems, 
or give tongue to my views, or let her sus- 
pect for a moment I was a special idea on 
legs. It was much lovelier to have her think 
I was utterly forlorn. 

This morning when I said good-bye I 
fumbled my hat, mumbled my words and 
shuffled my feet, and may the Good St. 
Francis reward her. 

When I asked the way to Tipton the 
farmer wanted me to walk the railroad. 
People cannot see "why the Sam Hill" any- 
one wants to walk the highway when the 
rails make a bee-line for the destination. 
This fellow was so anxious for the preser- 
vation of my feet he insisted it looked like 
rain. I finally agreed that, for the sake of 
avoiding a wetting, I had best hurry to Tip- 
ton by the ties. The six miles of railroad 
between Clarksburg and Tipton should be 
visited by every botanist in the United 
States. Skip the rest of this letter unless 
you are interested in a catalogue of flowers. 



THROUGH MISSOURI 49 

First comes the reed with the deep blue 
blossoms at the top that has bloomed by my 
path all the way from Springfield, Illinois. 
Then come enormous wild roses, showing 
every hue that friend of man ever displayed. 
Behold an army of white poppies join our 
march, then healthy legions of waving mus- 
tard. Our next recruits are tiny golden- 
hearted ragged kinsmen of the sunflower. 
No comrades depart from this triumphal 
march to Tipton. Once having joined us, 
they continue in our company. The mass 
of color grows deeper and more subtle each 
moment. Behold, regiments of pale laven- 
der larkspur. 'Tis an excellent garden, the 
finer that it needs no tending. Though the 
rain has failed to come, I begin to be glad I 
am hobbling along over the vexatious ties. 
I forget my resolve to run for President. 

Once I determined to be a candidate. I 
knew I would get the tramp-vote and the 
actor-vote. My platform was to be that 



50 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

railroad ties should be just close enough for 
men to walk on them in natural steps, neither 
mincing the stride nor widely stretching the 
legs. 

Not yet have we reached Tipton. Behold 
a white flower, worthy of a better name, that 
the farmers call "sheep's tea." Behold 
purple larkspur joining the lavender lark- 
spur. Behold that disreputable camp-fol- 
lower the button-weed, wearing its shabby 
finery. Now a red delicate grass joins in, 
and a big purple and pink sort of an aster. 
Behold a pink and white sheep's tea. And 
look, there is a dwarf morning glory, the 
sweetest in the world. Here is a group of 
black-eyed Susans, marching like suffra- 
gettes to get the vote at Tipton. Here is a 
war-dance of Indian Paint. And here are 
bluebells. 

"Goin' west harvestin'?" 

"I have harvested already, ten thousand 
flowers an hour." 



THROUGH MISSOURI 51 

June 10, 1912. 3 p. m. Three miles west 
of Sedalia, Missouri. In the woods. Near 
the automobile road to Kansas City. 

Now that I have passed Sedalia I am 
pretty well on toward the Kansas line. 
Only three more days' journey, and then I 
shall be in Kansas, State of Romance, State 
of Expectation. Goodness knows Missouri 
has plenty of incident, plenty of merit. But 
it is a cross between Illinois and northern 
Kentucky, and to beg here is like begging 
in my own back-yard. 

But the heart of Kansas is the heart of 

the West Inclosed find a feather 

from the wing of a young chicken-hawk. 
He happened across the road day before 
yesterday. The farmer stopped the team 
and killed him with his pitchfork. That 
farmer seemed to think he had done the Lord 
a service in ridding the world of a parasite. 
Yet I had a certain fellow-feeling for the 
hawk, as I have for anybody who likes 
chicken. 



52 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

This walk is full of suggestions for 
poems. Sometimes, in a confidential mo- 
ment, I tell my hosts I am going to write a 
chronicle of the whole trip in verse. But I 
cannot write it now. The traveller at my 
stage is in a kind of farm-hand condition of 
mind and blood. He feels himself so much 
a part of the soil and the sun and the 
ploughed acres, he eats so hard and sleeps 
so hard, he has little more patience in trying 
to write than the husbandman himself. 

If that poem is ever written I shall say, — 
to my fellow-citizens of Springfield, for in- 
stance: — "I have gone as your delegate to 
greet the fields, to claim them for you 
against a better day. I lay hold on these 
furrows on behalf of all those cooped up in 
cities." 

I feel that in a certain mystical sense I 
have made myself part of the hundreds and 
hundreds of farms that lie between me and 
machine-made America. I have scarcely 
seen anything but crops since I left home. 



THROUGH MISSOURI 53 

The whole human race is grubbing in the 
soil, and the soil is responding with tremen- 
dous vigor. By walking I get as tired as 
any and imagine I work too. Sometimes 
the glory goes. Then I feel my own idle- 
ness above all other facts on earth. I want 
to get to work immediately. But I suppose 
I am a minstrel or nothing. (There goes a 
squirrel through the treetops.) 

Every time I say "No" to the question 
"Goin' west harvestin'?" I am a little less 
brisk about reciting that triad of poems that 
I find is the best brief exposition of my 
gospel: (1) The Proud Farmer, (2) The 
Illinois Village and (8) The Building of 
Springfield. 

If I do harvest it is likely to be just as it 
was at the Springfield water-works a year 
ago, when I broke my back in a week trying 
to wheel bricks. 

June 12, 1912. On the banks of a stream 
west of the town of Warrensburg', Missouri. 



54 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Perhaps the problem of a night's lodging 
has been solved. I seem to have found a 
substitute for the spare bedrooms and white 
sheets of Georgia and Pennsylvania. It ap- 
pears that no livery stable will refuse a man 
a place to sleep. What happened at Otter- 
ville and Warrensburg I can make happen 
from here on, or so I am assured by a farm- 
hand. He told me that every tiniest village 
from here to western Kansas has at least 
two livery-stables and there a man may sleep 
for the asking. He should try to get per- 
mission to mount to the hay-mow, for, un- 
less the cot in the office is a mere stretch of 
canvas, it is likely to be (excuse me) vermi- 
niferous. The stable man asks if the men- 
dicant has matches or tobacco. If he has 
he must give them up. Also he is told not 
to poke his head far out of the loft window, 
for, if the insurance man caught him, it 
would be all up with the insurance. These 
preliminaries quickly settled, the transient 
requests a buggy-robe to sleep in, lest he be 



THROUGH MISSOURI 55 

overwhelmed with the loan of a horse- 
blanket. The objection to a horse-blanket 
is that it is a horse-blanket. 

And so, if I am to believe my friend with 
the red neck, my good times at Warrens- 
burg and Otter ville are likely to continue. 

Strange as it may seem, sleeping in a hay- 
loft is Romance itself. The alfalfa is soft 
and fragrant and clean, the wind blows 
through the big loft door, the stars shine 
through the cottonwoods. If I wake in the 
night I hear the stable-boys bringing in the 
teams of men who have driven a long way 
and back again to get something; — to get 
drunk, or steal the kisses of somebody's wife 
or put over a political deal or get a chance 
to preach a sermon; — and I get scraps of 
detail from the stable-boys after the main 
actors of the drama have gone. It sounds 
as though all the remarks were being made 
in the loft instead of on the ground floor. 
The horses stamp and stamp and the grind- 
ing sound of their teeth is so close to me I 



56 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

cannot believe at first that the mangers and 
feed-boxes are way down below. 

It is morning before I know it and the 
gorged birds are singing "shivaree, shiva- 
ree, Rachel Jane, Rachel Jane" in the mul- 
berry trees, just outside the loft window. 
After a short walk I negotiate for break- 
fast, then walk on through Paradise and at 
the proper time negotiate for dinner, walk 
on through Paradise again and at six nego- 
tiate for the paradisical haymow, without 
looking for supper, and again more sleepy 
than hungry. The difference between this 
system and the old one is that about half 
past four I used to begin to worry about 
supper and night accommodations, and gen- 
erally worried till seven. Now life is one 
long sweet stroll, and I watch the sunset 
from my bed in the alfalfa with the delights 
of the whole day renewed in my heart. 

Passing through the village of Sedalia I 
inquired the way out of town to the main 
road west. My informant was a man named 



THROUGH MISSOURI 57 

McSweeny, drunk enough to be awfully 
friendly. He asked all sorts of questions. 
He induced me to step two blocks out of 
my main course down a side-street to his 
"Restaurant." He said he was not going to 
let me leave town without a square meal. It 
was a strange eating-place, full of ditch- 
diggers, teamsters, red-necked politicians 
and slender intellectual politicians. In the 
background was a scattering of the furtive 
daughters of pleasure, some white, some 
black. The whole institution was but an 
annex to the bar room in front. Mr. Mc- 
Sweeny looked over my book while I ate. 
After the meal he gathered a group of the 
politicians and commanded me to recite. I 
gave them my rhyme in memory of Altgeld 
and my rhyme in denunciation of Lorimer, 
and my rhyme denouncing all who cooper- 
ated in the white slave trade, including sell- 
ers of drink. Mr. McSweeny said I was the 
goods, and offered to pass the hat, but I 
would not permit. A handsome black jeze- 



58 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

bel sat as near us as she dared and listened 
quite seriously. I am sure she would have 
put something in that hat if it had gone 
round. 

"I suppose," said Mr. McSweeny, as he 
stood at his door to bow adieu, "you will 
harvest when you get a little further west?" 

That afternoon I walked miles and miles 
through rough country, and put up with a 
friendly farmer named John Humphrey. 
He had children like little golden doves, and 
a most hard-working wife. The man had 
harvested and travelled eight years in the 
west before he had settled down. He told 
me all about it. Until late that night he told 
me endless fascinating stories upon the 
theme of that free man's land ahead of me. 
If he had not had those rosy babies to an- 
chor him, he would have picked up and gone 
along, and argued down my rule to travel 
alone. 

Because he had been a man of the road 
there was a peculiar feeling of understand- 



THROUGH MISSOURI 59 

ing in the air. They were people of much 
natural refinement. I was the more grate- 
ful for their bread when I considered that 
when I came upon them at sunset they were 
working together in the field. There was 
not a hand to help. How could they be so 
happy and seem so blest? Their day was 
nearer sixteen than eight hours long. I felt 
deathly ashamed to eat their bread. I told 
them so, with emphasis. But the mother 
said, "We always takes in them that asks, 
and nobody never done us no harm yet." 

That night was a turning point with me. 
In reply to a certain question I said : "Yes. 
I am going west harvesting." 

I asked the veteran traveller to tell me the 
best place to harvest. He was sitting on 
the floor pulling the children's toes, and hav- 
ing a grand time. He drew himself up into 
a sort of oracular knot, with his chin on his 
knees, and gesticulated with his pipe. 

"Go straight west," he said, "to Great 
Bend, Barton County, Kansas, the banner 



60 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

wheat county of the United States. Arrive 
about July fifth. Walk to the public square. 
Walk two miles north. Look around. You 
will see nothing but wheat fields, and farm- 
ers standing on the edge of the road crying 
into big red handkerchiefs. Ask the first 
man for work. He will stop crying and 
give it to you. Wages will be two dollars 
and a half a day, and keep. You will have 
all you want to eat and a clean blanket in 
the hay." 

I have resolved to harvest at Great Bend. 

HEART OF GOD 

A PRAYER IN THE JUNGLES! OF HEAVEN 

great Heart of God, 

Once vague and lost to me, 

Why do I throb with your throb to-night, 

In this land, Eternity? 

little Heart of God, 

Sweet intruding stranger, 

You are laughing in my human breast, 

A Christ-child in a manger. 

Heart, dear Heart of God, 



THROUGH MISSOURI 61 

Beside you now I kneel, 

Strong Heart of Faith. Heart not mine, 

Where God has set His seal. 

Wild thundering Heart of God 

Out of my doubt I come, 

And my foolish feet with prophets' feet, 

March with the prophets' drum. 



Ill 

Walking into Kansas 

TT has been raining" quite a little. The 
roads are so muddy I have to walk the 
ties. Keeping company with the railroad is 
almost a habit. While this shower passes I 
write in the station at Stillweli, Kansas. 

June 14, 1912. I have crossed the mys- 
tic border. I have left Earth. I have en- 
tered Wonderland. Though I am still east 
of the geographical centre of the United 
States, in every spiritual sense I am in the 
West. This morning I passed the stone 
mile-post that marks the beginning of 
Kansas. 

I went over the border and encountered 
— what dc you think? Wild strawberries! 
Lo, where the farmer had cut the weeds 

62 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 63 

between the road and the fence, the gentle 
fruits revealed themselves, growing in the 
shadow down between the still-standing 
weeds. They shine out in a red line that 
stretches on and on, and a man has to re- 
solve to stop eating several times. Just as 
he thinks he has conquered desire the line 
gets dazzlingly red again. 

The berries grow at the end of a slender 
stalk, clustered six in a bunch. One gathers 
them by the stems, in bouquets, as it were, 
and eats off the fruit like taffy off a stick. 

I was gathering buckets of cherries for a 
farmer's wife yesterday. This morning after 
the strawberries had mitigated I encoun- 
tered a bush of raspberries, and then hedges 
on hedges of mulberries both white and red. 
The white mulberries are the sweetest. If 
this is the wild West, give me more. There 
are many varieties of trees, and they are 
thick as in the East. The people seem to 
grow more cordial. I was eating mulberries 
outside the yard of a villager. He asked 



64 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

me in where the eating was better. And 
then he told me the town scandal, while I 
had my dessert. 

A day or so ago I hoed corn all morning 
for my dinner. This I did cheerfully, con- 
sidering I had been given a good breakfast 
at that farm for nothing. I feel that two 
good meals are worth about a morning's 
work anyway. And then I had company. 
The elderly owner of the place hoed along 
with me. He saved the country, by preach- 
ing to me the old fashioned high tariff gos- 
pel, and I saved it by preaching to him the 
new fashioned Gospel of Beauty. Mean- 
while the corn was hoed. Then we went in 
and ate the grandest of dinners. That 
house was notable for having on its walls 
really artistic pictures, not merely respect- 
able pictures, nor yet seed-catalogue adver- 
tisements. 

That night, in passing through a village, 
I glimpsed a man washing his dishes in the 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 65 

rear of a blacksmith shop. I said to myself? 
" 'Ah ha! Somebody keeping bach." 

I knew I was welcome. There is no fear 
of the stranger in such a place, for there are 
no ladies to reassure or propitiate. Permis- 
sion to sleep on the floor was granted as soon 
as asked. I spread out The Kansas City 
Star, which is a clean sheet, put my verses 
under my head for a pillow and was con- 
tent. Next morning the sun was in my eyes. 
There was the odor of good fried bacon in 
the air. 

"Git up and eat a snack, pardner," said 
my friend the blacksmith. And while I ate 
he told me the story of his life. 

I had an amusing experience at the town 
of Belton. I had given an entertainment 
at the hotel on the promise of a night's lodg- 
ing. I slept late. Over my transom came 
the breakfast-table talk. "That was a hot 
entertainment that young bum gave us last 
night," said one man. "He ought to get to 
work, the dirty lazy loafer," said another. 



66 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

The schoolmaster spoke up in an effort 
not to condescend to his audience: "He is 
evidently a fraud. I talked to him a long 
time after the entertainment. The pieces 
he recited were certainly not his own. I have 
read some of them somewhere. It is too 
easy a way to get along, especially when 
the man is as able to work as this one. Of 
course in the old days literary men used to 
be obliged to do such things. But it isn't 
at all necessary in the Twentieth Century. 
Real poets are highly paid." Another spoke 
up: "I don't mind a fake, but he is a rot- 
ten reciter, anyhow. If he had said one 
more I would have just walked right out. 
You noticed ol' Mis' Smith went home after 
that piece about the worms." Then came the 
landlord's voice: "After the show was over 
I came pretty near not letting him have his 
room. All I've got to say is he don't get 
any breakfast." 

I dressed, opened the doorway serenely, 
and strolled past the table, smiling with all 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 67 

the ease of a minister at his own church- 
social. In my most ornate manner I thanked 
the landlord and landlady for their extreme 
kindness. I assumed that not one of the gen- 
tle-folk had intended to have me hear their 
analysis. 'Twas a grand exit. Yet, in plain 
language, these people "got my goat." I 
have struggled with myself all morning, al- 
most on the point of ordering a marked copy 
of a magazine sent to that smart school- 
master. "Evidently a fraud!" Indeed! 

"Goin' wes' harvesin'?" 

"Yes, yes. I think I will harvest when I 
get to Great Bend." 

June 18, 1912. Approaching Emporia. 
I am sitting in the hot sun by the Santa Fe 
tracks, after two days of walking those 
tracks in the rain. I am near a queer little 
Mexican house built of old railroad ties. 

I had had two sticks of candy begged 
from a grocer for breakfast. I was keep- 
ing warm by walking fast. Because of the 



68 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

muddy roads and the sheets of rain coming 
down it was impossible to leave the tracks. 
It was almost impossible to make speed since 
the ballast underfoot was almost all of it 
big rattling broken stone. I had walked 
that Santa Fe railroad a day and a half in 
the drizzle and downpour. It was a little 
past noon, and my scanty inner fuel was 
almost used up. I dared not stop a minute 
now, lest I catch cold. There was no station 
in sight ahead. When the mists lifted I saw 
that the tracks went on and on, straight west 
to the crack of doom, not even a water-tank 
in sight. The mists came down, then lifted 
once more, and, as though I were Childe 
Roland, I suddenly saw a shack to the right, 
in dimensions about seven feet each way. 
It was mostly stove-pipe, and that pipe was 
pouring out enough smoke to make three of 
Aladdin's Jinns. I presume some one heard 
me whistling. The little door opened. Two 
heads popped out, "Come in, you slab-sided 
hobo," they yelled affectionately. "Come in 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 69 

and get dry." And so my heart was made 
suddenly light after a day and a half of 
hard whistling. 

At the inside end of that busy smoke- 
stack was a roaring redhot stove about as 
big as a hat. It had just room enough on 
top for three steaming coffee cans at a time. 
There were four white men with their chins 
on their knees completely occupying the 
floor of one side of the mansion, and four 
Mexicans filled the other. Every man was 
hunched up to take as little room as possi- 
ble. It appeared that my only chance was 
to move the tins and sit on the stove. But 
one Mexican sort of sat on another Mexican 
and the new white man was accommodated. 
These fellows were a double-section gang, 
for the track is double all along here. 

I dried out pretty quick. The men began 
to pass up the coffee off the stove. It 
strangled and blistered me, it was so hot. 
The men were almost to the bottom of the 
food sections of their buckets and were be- 



70 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

ginning to throw perfectly good sandwiches 
and extra pieces of pie through the door. 
I said that if any man had anything to throw 
away would he just wait till I stepped out- 
side so I could catch it. They handed me 
all I could ever imagine a man eating. It 
rained and rained and rained, and I ate till 
I could eat no more. One man gave me for 
dessert the last half of his cup of stewed 
raisins along with his own spoon. Good 
raisins they were, too. A Mexican urged 
upon me some brown paper and cigarette 
tobacco. I was sorry I did not smoke. The 
men passed up more and more hot coffee. 

That coffee made me into a sort of thermos 
bottle. On the strength of it I walked all 
afternoon through sheets and cataracts. 
When dark came I slept in wet clothes in a 
damp blanket in the hay of a windy livery- 
stable without catching cold. 

Now it is morning. The sky is reasonably 
clear, the weather is reasonably warm, but I 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 71 

am no longer a thermos bottle, no, no. I am 
sitting on the hottest rock I can find, letting 
the sun go through my bones. The coffee 
in me has turned at last to ice and snow. 
Emporia, the Athens of America, is just 
ahead. Oh, for a hot bath and a clean shirt ! 
A mad dog tried to bite me yesterday 
morning, when I made a feeble attempt to 
leave the track. When I was once back on 
the ties, he seemed afraid and would not 
come closer. His bark was the ghastliest 
thing I ever heard. As for his bite, he did 
not get quite through my shoe-heel. 

Emporia, Kansas, June 19, 1912. On 
inquiring at the Emporia General De- 
livery for mail, I found your letter telling 
me to call upon your friend Professor Kerr. 
He took my sudden appearance most kind- 
ly, and pardoned my battered attire and the 
mud to the knees. After a day in his house 
I am ready to go on, dry and feasted and 
warm and clean. The j)rofessor's help 



72 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

seemed to come in just in time. I was a most 
weary creature. 

Thinking it over this morning, the bath- 
tub appears to be the first outstanding ad- 
vantage the cultured man has over the half- 
civilized. Quite often the folk with swept 
houses and decent cooking who have given 
my poems discriminating attention, who 
have given me good things to eat, forget, 
even when they entertain him overnight, 
that the stranger would like to soak himself 
thoroughly. Many of the working people 
seem to keep fairly clean with the washpan 
as their principal ally. But the tub is indis- 
pensable to the mendicant in the end, unless 
he is walking through a land of crystal 
waterfalls, like North Georgia. 

I am an artificial creature at last, depend- 
ent, after all, upon modern plumbing. 'Tis, 
perhaps, not a dignified theme, but I retired 
to the professor's bathroom and washed off 
the entire State of Missouri and the eastern 
counties of Kansas, and did a deal of 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 73 

laundry work on the sly. This last was not 
openly confessed to the professor, but he 
might have guessed, I was so cold on the 
front porch that night. 

I shall not soon lose the memory of this 
the first day of emergence from the strait 
paths of St. Francis, this first meeting, since 
I left Springfield, with a person on whom I 
had a conventional social claim. I had for- 
gotten what the delicacy of a cultured wel- 
come would be like. The professor's table 
was a marvel to me. I was astonished to 
discover there were such fine distinctions in 
food and linen. And for all my troubadour 
profession, I had almost forgotten there 
were such distinctions in books. I have 
hardly seen one magazine since I left you. 
The world where I have been moving reads 
nothing but newspapers. It is confusing to 
bob from one world to the other, to zig-zag 
across the social dead-line. I sat in the pro- 
fessor's library a very mixed-up person, feel- 
ing I could hardly stay a minute, yet too 



74 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

heavy-footed to stir an inch, and immensely 
grateful and relaxed. 

Sooner or later I am going to step up into 
the rarefied civilized air once too often and 
stay there in spite of myself. I shall get a 
little too fond of the china and old silver, 
and forget the fields. Books and teacups 
and high-brow conversations are awfully in- 
sinuating things, if you give them time to 
be. One gets along somehow, and pleasure 
alternates with pain, and the sum is the joy 
of life, while one is below. But to quit is 
like coming up to earth after deep-sea diving 
in a heavy suit. One scarcely realizes he has 
been under heavier-than-air pressure, and 
has been fighting off great forces, till he has 
taken off his diving helmet, as it were. And 
yet there is a baffling sense of futility in the 
restful upper air. I remember it once, long 
ago, in emerging in Warren, Ohio, and once 
in emerging in Macon, Georgia: — the feel- 
ing that the upper world is all tissue paper, 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 75 

that the only choice a real man can make is 
to stay below with the great forces of life 
forever, even though he be a tramp — the 
feeling that, to be a little civilized, we sac- 
rifice enormous powers and joys. For all 
I was so tired and so very grateful to the 
professor, I felt like a bull in a china shop. 
I should have been out in the fields, eating 
grass. 

THE KALLYOPE YELL 

[Loudly and rapidly with a leader > College 
yell fashion'] 



Proud men 

Eternally 

Go about, 

Slander me, 

Call me the "Calliope.' 

Sizz 

Fizz 



76 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

II 

I am the Gutter Dream, 

Tune-maker, born of steam, 

Tooting joy, tooting hope. 

I am the Kallyope, 

Car called the Kallyope. 

Willy willy willy wah hoo! 

See the flags: snow-white tent, 

See the bear and elephant, 

See the monkey jump the rope, 

Listen to the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope ! 

Soul of the rhinoceros 

And the hippopotamus 

(Listen to the lion roar!) 

Jaguar, cockatoot, 

Loons, owls, 

Hoot, Hoot. 

Listen to the lion roar, 

Listen to the lion roar, 

Listen to the lion r-o-a-r! 

Hear the leopard cry for gore, 

Willy willy willy wah hoo ! 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 77 

Hail the bloody Indian band, 

Hail, all hail the popcorn stand, 

Hail to Barnum's picture there, 

People's idol everywhere, 

Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop! 

Music of the mob am I, 

Circus day's tremendous cry: — 

I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope! 

Hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot, 

Willy willy willy wah hoo ! 

Sizz, fizz 

Ill 

Born of mobs, born of steam, 
Listen to my golden dream, 
Listen to my golden dream, 
Listen to my g-o-l-d-e-n d-r-e-a-m ! 
Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop! 
I will blow the proud folk low, 
Humanize the dour and slow, 
I will shake the proud folk down, 
(Listen to the lion roar!) 
Popcorn crowds shall rule the town — 



78 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Willy willy willy wall hoo! 

Steam shall work melodiously, 

Brotherhood increase. 

You'll see the world and all it holds 

For ffty cents apiece. 

Willy willy willy wah hoo! 

Every day a circus day. 

What? 

Well, almost every day. 
Nevermore the sweater's den, 
Nevermore the prison pen. 
Gone the war on land and sea 
That aforetime troubled men. 
Nations all in amity, 
Happy in their plumes arrayed 
In the long bright street parade. 
Bands a-playing every day. 

What? 

Well, almost every day. 

I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope! 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 79 

Willy willy willy wall hoo! 
Hoot, toot, hoot, toot, 
Whoop whoop whoop whoop, 
Willy willy willy wah hoo! 
Sizz, fizz 

IV 

Every soul 
Resident 

In the earth's one circus tent! 
Every man a trapeze king 
Then a pleased spectator there. 
On the benches ! In the ring ! 
While the neighbors gawk and stare 
And the cheering rolls along. 
Almost every day a race 
When the merry starting gong 
Rings, each chariot on the line, 
Every driver fit and fine 
With the steel-spring Roman grace. 
Almost every day a dream, 
Almost every day a dream. 
Every girl, 



80 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Maid or wife, 

Wild with music, 

Eyes a-gleam 

With that marvel called desire: 

Actress, princess, fit for life, 

Armed with honor like a knife, 

Jumping thro' the hoops of fire. 

(Listen to the lion roar!) 

Making all the children shout 

Clowns shall tumble all about, 

Painted high and full of song 

While the cheering rolls along, 

Tho' they scream, 

Tho' they rage, 

Every beast 

In his cage, 

Every beast 

In his den 

That aforetime troubled men. 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 81 



I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope, 
Tooting hope, tooting hope, tooting hope, 

tooting hope ; 
Shaking window-pane and door 
With a crashing cosmic tune, 
With the war-cry of the spheres, 
Rhythm of the roar of noon, 
Rhythm of Niagara's roar, 
Voicing planet, star and moon, 
Shrieking of the better years. 
Prophet-singers will arise, 
Prophets coming after me, 
Sing my song in softer guise 
With more delicate surprise; 
I am but the pioneer 
Voice of the Democracy; 
I am the gutter dream, 
I am the golden dream, 
Singing science, singing steam. 
I will blow the proud folk down, 



82 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

(Listen to the lion roar!) 

I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope, 

Tooting hope, tooting hope, tooting hope, 

tooting hope, 
Willy willy willy wah hoo ! 
Hoot, toot, hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot, 
Whoop whoop, whoop whoop, 
Whoop whoop, whoop whoop, 
Willy willy willy wah hoo! 

Sizz 

Fizz 

Sunday Morning, June 23, 1912. I am 

writing on the top of a pile of creosote- 
soaked ties between the Santa Fe tracks and 
the trail that runs parallel to the tracks. 
Florence, Kansas, is somewhere ahead. 

In the East the railroads and machinery 
choke the land to death and it was there I 
made my rule against them. But the far- 
ther West I go the more the very life of the 
country seems to depend upon them. I sup- 
pose, though, that some day, even out West 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 86 

here, the rule against the railroad will be a 
good rule. 

Meanwhile let me say that my Ruskinian 
prejudices are temporarily overcome by the 
picturesqueness and efficiency of the Santa 
Fe. It is double-tracked, and every four 
miles is kept in order by a hand-car crew 
that is spinning back and forth all the time. 
The air seems to be full of hand-cars. 

Walking in a hurry to make a certain 
place by nightfall I have become acquainted 
with these section hands, and, most delight- 
ful to relate, have ridden in their iron con- 
veyances, putting my own back into the 
work. Half or three-fourths of the em- 
ployees are Mexicans who are as ornamental 
in the actual landscape as they are in a Rem- 
ington drawing. These Mexicans are tract- 
able serfs of the Santa Fe. If there were 
enough miles of railroad in Mexico to keep 
all the inhabitants busy on section, perhaps 
the internal difficulties could be ended. 
These peons live peacefully next to the 



84 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

tracks in houses built by the company from 
old ties. The ties are placed on end, side by 
side, with plaster in the cracks, on a tiny 
oblong two-room plan. There is a little 
roofed court between the rooms. A farmer 
told me that the company tried Greek serfs 
for a while, but they made trouble for out- 
siders and murdered each other. 

The road is busy as busy can be. Almost 
any time one can see enormous freight-trains 
rolling by or mile-a-minute passenger trains. 
Gates are provided for each farmer's 
right of way. I was told by an exceptional 
Mexican with powers of speech that the effi- 
cient dragging of the wagon-roads, espe- 
cially the "New Santa Fe Trail" that fol- 
lows the railroad, is owing to the missionary 
work of King, the split-log drag man, who 
was employed to go up and down this land 
agitating his hobby. 

When the weather is good, touring auto- 
mobiles whiz past. They have pennants 
showing they are from Kansas City, Em- 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 85 

poria, New York or Chicago. They have 
camping canvas and bedding on the back 
seats of the car, or strapped in the rear. 
They are on camping tours to Colorado 
Springs and the like pleasure places. Some 
few avow they are going to the coast. About 
five o'clock in the evening some man making 
a local trip is apt to come along alone. He 
it is that wants the other side of the machine 
weighed down. He it is that will offer me a 
ride and spin me along from five to twenty- 
five miles before supper. This delightful 
use that may be made of an automobile in 
rounding out a day's walk has had some- 
thing to do with mending my prejudice 
against it, despite the grand airs of the tour- 
ists that whirl by at midday. I still main- 
tain that the auto is a carnal institution, to 
be shunned by the truly spiritual, but there 
are times when I, for one, get tired of being 
spiritual. 

Much of the country east of Emporia is 
hilly and well-wooded and hedged like Mis- 



86 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

souri. But now I am getting into the range 
region. Yesterday, after several miles of 
treeless land that had never known the 
plough, I said to myself: "Now I am really 
West." And my impression was reinforced 
when I reached a grand baronial establish- 
ment called "Clover Hill Ranch." It was 
flanked by the houses of the retainers. In 
the foreground and a little to the side was 
the great stone barn for the mules and horses. 
Back on the little hill, properly introduced 
by ceremonious trees, was the ranch house 
itself. And before it was my lord on his 
ranching charger. The aforesaid lord 
created quite an atmosphere of lordliness as 
he refused work in the alfalfa harvest to a 
battered stranger who bowed too low and 
begged too hard, perhaps. On the porch 
was my lady, feeding bread and honey to the 
beautiful young prince of the place. 

I have not yet reached the wheat belt. 
Since the alfalfa harvest is on here, I shall 
try for that a bit. 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 87 

Sunday Afternoon, June 30, 1912. In 
the spare room of a Mennonite farmer, who 
lives just inside the wheat belt. 

This is going to be a long Sunday after- 
noon ; so make up your minds for a long let- 
ter. I did not get work in the alfalfa. Yet 
there is news. I have been staying a week 
with this Mennonite family shocking wheat 
for them, though I am not anywhere near 
Great Bend. 

Before I tell you of the harvest, I must 
tell you of these Mennonites. They are a 
dear people. I have heard from their rev- 
erent lips the name of their founder, Menno 
Simonis, who was born about the time of 
Columbus and Luther and other such 
worthies. They are as opposed to carnal 
literature as I am to tailor-made clothes, 
and I hold they are perfectly correct in al- 
lowing no fashion magazines in the house. 
Such modern books as they read deal with 
practical local philanthropies and great in- 
ternational mission movements, and their in- 



88 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

terdenominational feelings for all Christen- 
dom are strong. Yet they hold to their an- 
cient verities, and antiquity broods over their 
meditations. 

For instance I found in their bookcase an 
endless dialogue epic called The Wandering 
Soulj, in which this soul, seeking mainly for 
information, engages in stilted conversation 
with Adam, Noah, and Simon Cleophas. 
Thereby the Wandering Soul is informed 
as to the orthodox history and chronology of 
the world from the Creation to the destruc' 
tion of Jerusalem. The wood-cuts are dc 
votional. They are worth walking to Kan- 
sas to see. The book had its third trans- 
lation into Pennsylvania English in 1840, 
but several American editions had existed 
in German before that, and several German 
editions in Germany. It was originally 
written in the Dutch language and was pop- 
ular among the Mennonites there. But it 
looks as if it was printed by Adam to last 
forever and scare bad boys. 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 89 

Let us go to meeting. All the women are 
on their own side of the aisle. All of them 
have a fairly uniform Quakerish sort of 
dress of no prescribed color. In front are 
the most pious, who wear a black scoop-bon- 
net. Some have taken this off, and show 
the inevitable "prayer-covering" underneath. 
It is the plainest kind of a lace-cap, awfully 
coquettish on a pretty head. It is intended 
to mortify the flesh, and I suppose it is un- 
becoming to some women. 

All the scoop-bonnets are not black. 
Toward the middle of the church, behold a 
cream-satin, a soft gray, a dull moon-gold. 
One young woman, moved, I fear, by the 
devil, turns and looks across the aisle at us. 
An exceedingly demure bow is tied all too 
sweetly under the chin, in a decorous butter- 
fly style. Fie! fie! Is this mortifying the 
flesh? And I note with pain that the black 
bonnets grow fewer and fewer toward the 
rear of the meeting house. 

Here come the children, with bobbing 



90 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

headgear of every color of the rainbow, yet 
the same scoop-pattern still. They have been 
taking little walks and runs between Sun- 
day-school and church, and are all flushed 
and panting. But I would no more criticise 
the color of their headgear than the color in 
their faces. Some of them squeeze in among 
the black rows in front and make piety rea- 
sonable. But we noted by the door as they 
entered something that both the church and 
the world must abhor. Seated as near to the 
men's side as they can get, with a mixture 
of shame and defiance in their faces, are cer- 
tain daughters of the Mennonites who in- 
sist on dressing after the fashions that come 
from Paris and Kansas City and Emporia. 
By the time the rumors of what is proper in 
millinery have reached this place they are a 
disconcerting mixture of cherries, feathers 
and ferns. And somehow there are too many 
mussy ribbons on the dresses. 

We can only guess how these rebels must 
suffer under the concentrated silent prayers 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 91 

of the godly. Poor honest souls ! they take 
to this world's vain baggage and overdo it. 
Why do they not make up their minds to 
serve the devil sideways, like that sly puss 
with the butterfly bow? 

On the men's side of the house the divi- 
sion on dress is more acute. The Holiness 
movement, the doctrine of the Second Bless- 
ing that has stirred many rural Methodist 
groups, has attacked the Mennonites also. 
Those who dispute for this new ism of sanc- 
tification leave off their neckties as a sign. 
Those that retain their neckties, satisfied 
with what Menno Simonis taught, have a 
hard time remaining in a state of complete 
calm. The temptation to argue the matter 
is almost more than flesh can bear. 

But, so far as I could discover, there was 
no silent prayer over the worst lapse of these 
people. What remains of my Franciscan 
soul was hurt to discover that the buggy- 
shed of the meeting-house was full of auto- 
mobiles. And to meet a Mennonite on the 



92 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

road without a necktie, his wife in the black- 
est of bonnets, honking along in one of those 
glittering brazen machines, almost shakes 
my confidence in the Old Jerusalem Gospel. 

Yet let me not indulge in disrespect. 
Every spiritual warfare must abound in its 
little ironies. They are keeping their rule 
against finery as well as I am keeping mine 
against the railroad. And they have their 
own way of not being corrupted by money. 
Their ministry is unsalaried. Their preach- 
ers are sometimes helpers on the farms, 
sometimes taken care of outright, the same 
as I am. 

As will later appear, despite some incon- 
sistencies, the Mennonites have a piety as 
literal as any to be found on the earth. Since 
they are German there is no lack of thought 
in their system. I attended one of their 
quarterly conferences and I have never 
heard better discourses on the distinctions 
between the four gospels. The men who 
spoke were scholars. 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 93 

The Mennonites make it a principle to ig- 
nore politics, and are non-resistants in war. 
I have read in the life of one of their heroes 
what a terrible time his people had in the 
Shenandoah valley in the days of Sheridan. 
. . . Three solemn tracts are here on my 
dresser. The first is against church organs, 
embodying a plea for simplicity and the 
spending of such money on local benevo- 
lences and world-wide missions. The tract 
aptly compares the church-organ to the Thi- 
betan prayer- wheel, and later to praying by 
phonograph. A song is a prayer to them, 
and they sing hymns and nothing but hymns 
all week long. 

The next tract is on non-conformity to 
this world, and insists our appearance should 
indicate our profession, and that fashions 
drive the poor away from the church. It 
condemns jewels and plaiting of the hair, 
etc., and says that such things stir up a 
wicked and worldly lust in the eyes of youth. 
This tract goes so far as to put worldly pic- 



94 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

tures under the ban. Then comes another, 
headed Bible Teaching on Dress. It goes 
on to show that every true Christian, espe- 
cially that vain bird, the female, should wear 
something like the Mennonite uniform to 
indicate the line of separation from "the 
World." I have a good deal of sympathy 
for all this, for indeed is it not briefly com- 
prehended in my own rule: "Carry no bag- 
gage"? 

These people celebrate communion every 
half year, and at the same time they practise 
the ritual of washing the feet. Since Isa- 
dora Duncan has rediscovered the human 
foot aesthetically, who dares object to it in 
ritual? It is all a question of what we 
are trained to expect. Certainly these people 
are respecters of the human foot and not 
ashamed to show it. Next to the wav their 
women have of making a dash to find their 
gauzy prayer-covering, which they put on 
for grace at table and Bible-lesson before 
breakfast, their most striking habit is the 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 95 

way both men and women go about in very- 
clean bare feet after supper. Next to this 
let me note their resolve to have no profane 
hour whatsoever. When not actually at 
work they sit and sing hymns, each Christian 
on his own hook as he has leisure. 

My first evening among these dear 
strangers I was sitting alone by the front 
door, looking out on the wheat. I was 
thrilled to see the fairest member of the 
household enter, not without grace and dig- 
nity. Her prayer covering was on her head, 
her white feet were shining like those of 
Nicolette and her white hymn-book was in 
her hand. She ignored me entirely. She 
was rapt in trance. She sat by the window 
and sang through the book, looking straight 
at a rose in the wall-paper. 

I lingered there, reading The Wandering 
Soul just as oblivious of her presence as she 
was of mine. Oh, no; there was no art in 
the selection of her songs ! I remember one 
which was to this effect: 



96 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

"Don't let it be said : 
'Too late, too late 
To enter that Golden Gate.' 
Be ready, for soon 
The time will come 
'"o enter that Golden Gate." 



On the whole she had as much right to 
plunk down and sing hymns out of season 
as I have to burst in and quote poetry to 
peaceful and unprotected households. 

I would like to insert a discourse here on 
the pleasure and the naturalness and the hu- 
manness of testifying to one's gospel what- 
ever that gospel may be, barefooted or gol- 
den-slippered or iron-shod. The best we 
may win in return may be but a kindly 
smile. We may never make one convert. 
Still the duty of testifying remains, and 
is enjoined by the invisible powers and 
makes for the health of the soul. This Men- 
nonite was a priestess of her view of the 
truth and comes of endless generations of 
such snow-footed apostles. I presume the 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 97 

sect ceased to enlarge when the Quakers 
ceased to thrive, but I make my guess that 
it does not crumble as fast as the Quakers, 
having more German stolidity. 

Let me again go forward, testifying to 
my particular lonely gospel in the face of 
such pleasant smiles and incredulous ques- 
tions as may come. I wish I could start a 
sturdy sect like old Menno Simonis did. 
They should dress as these have done, and 
be as stubborn and rigid in their discipline. 
They should farm as these have done, but 
on reaching the point where the Mennonite 
buys the automobile, that money and energy 
should go into the making of cross-roads 
palaces for the people, golden as the harvest 
field, and disciplined well-parked villages, 
good as a psalm, and cities fair as a Men- 
nonite lady in her prayer-covering, delicate 
and noble as Athens the unforgotten, the 
divine. 

The Mennonite doctrine of non-participa- 
tion in war or politics leads them to confine 



98 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

their periodic literature to religious journals 
exclusively, plus The Drover's Journal to 
keep them up to date on the prices of farm- 
products. There is only one Mennonite po- 
litical event, the coming of Christ to judge 
the earth. Of that no man knoweth the 
day or the hour. We had best be prepared 
and not play politics or baseball or any- 
thing. Just keep unspotted and harvest the 
wheat. 

"Goin' wes' harvesin'?" 

I have harvested, thank you. Four days 
and a half I have shocked wheat in these 
prayer-consecrated fields that I see even now 
from my window. And I have good hard 
dollars in my pocket, which same dollars are 
against my rules. 

I will tell you of the harvest in the next 
letter. 



WALKING INTO KANSAS 99 

ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE 

On the road to nowhere 
What wild oats did you sow 
When you left your father's house 
With your cheeJcs aglow? 
Eyes so strained and eager 
To see what you might see? 
Were you thief or were you fool 
Or most nobly free? 
Were the tramp-days knightly, 
True sowing of wild seed? 
Did you dare to make the songs 
Vanquished workmen need? 
Did you waste much money 
To deck a leper's feast? 
Love the truth, defy the crowd, 
Scandalize the priest? 
On the road to nowhere 
What wild oats did you sow? 
Stupids find the nowhere-road 
Dusty, grim and slow. 
Ere their sowing's ended 
They turn them on their track: 
Look at the caitiff craven wights 
Repentant, hurrying back! 



100 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Grown ashamed of nowhere, 
Of rags endured for years, 
Lust for velvet in their hearts, 
Pierced with Mammon's spears. 
All but a few fanatics 
Give up their darling goal, 
Seek to be as others are, 
Stultify the soul. 
Reapings now confront them, 
Glut them, or destroy, 
Curious seeds, grain or weeds, 
Sown with awful joy. 
Hurried is their harvest, 
They make soft peace with men. 
Pilgrims pass. They care not, 
Will not tramp again. 
nowhere, golden nowhere! 
Sages and fools go on 
To your chaotic ocean, 
To your tremendous dawn. 
Far in your fair dream-haven, 
Is nothing or is all . . . 
They press on, singing, sowing 
Wild deeds without recall! 



IV 

In Kansas: The First Harvest 

Monday Afternoon, July 1, 1912. A 
little west of Newton, Kansas. In the pub- 
lic library of a village whose name I forget. 

Here is the story of how I came to har- 
vest. I was by chance taking a short respite 
from the sunshine, last Monday noon, on 
the porch of the Mennonite farmer. I had 
had dinner further back. But the good folk 
asked me to come in and have dessert any- 
way. It transpired that one of the two 
harvest hands was taking his farewell meal. 
He was obliged to fill a contract to work 
further West, a contract made last year. I 
timidly suggested I might take his place. 
To my astonishment I was engaged at once. 
This fellow was working for two dollars a 
101 



102 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

day, but I agreed to $1.75, seeing my pre- 
decessor was a skilled man and twice as big 
as I was. My wages, as I discovered, in- 
cluded three rich meals, and a pretty spare 
room to sleep in, and a good big bucket 
to bathe in nightly. 

I anticipate history at this point by telling 
how at the end of the week my wages looked 
as strange to me as a bunch of unexpected 
ducklets to a hen. They were as curious to 
contemplate as a group of mischievous nieces 
who have come to spend the day with their 
embarrassed, fluttering maiden aunt. 

I took my wages to Newton, and spent 
all on the vanities of this life. First the 
grandest kind of a sombrero, so I shall not 
be sun-struck in the next harvest-field, which 
I narrowly escaped in this. Next, the most 
indestructible of corduroys. Then I had 
my shoes re-soled and bought a necktie that 
was like the orifiamme of Navarre, and at- 
tended to several other points of vanity. I 
started out again, dead broke and happy. 



THE FIRST HARVEST 103 

If I work hereafter I can send most all my 
wages home, for I am now in real travelling 
costume. 

But why linger over the question of wages 
till I show I earned those wages? 

Let me tell you of a typical wheat-har- 
vesting day. The field is two miles from the 
house. We make preparations for a twelve- 
hour siege. Halters and a barrel of water 
and a heap of alfalfa for the mules, binder- 
twine and oil for the reaper and water- jugs 
for us are loaded into the spring wagon. 
Two mules are hitched in front, two are led 
behind. The new reaper was left in the field 
yesterday. We make haste. We must be 
at work by the time the dew dries. The 
four mules are soon hitched to the reaper 
and proudly driven into the wheat by the son 
of the old Mennonite. This young fellow 
carries himself with proper dignity as heir 
of the farm. He is a credit to the father. 
He will not curse the mules, though those 
animals forget their religion sometimes, and 



104 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

act after the manner of their kind. The 
worst he will do will be to call one of them 
an old cow. I suppose when he is vexed 
with a cow he calls it an old mule. My 
other companion is a boy of nineteen from a 
Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. He 
sets me a pace. Together we build the 
sheaves into shocks, of eight or ten sheaves 
each, put so they will not be shaken by an 
ordinary Kansas wind. The wind has been 
blowing nearly all the time at a rate which 
in Illinois would mean a thunderstorm in 
five minutes, and sometimes the clouds loom 
in the thunderstorm way, yet there is not a 
drop of rain, and the clouds are soon gone. 
In the course of the week the boy and I 
have wrestled with heavy ripe sheaves, 
heavier green sheaves, sheaves full of Rus- 
sian thistles and sheaves with the string off. 
The boy, as he sings The day-star hath risen, 
twists a curious rope of straw and reties the 
loose bundles with one turn of the hand. 



THE FIRST HARVEST 105 

I try, but cannot make the knot. Once all 
sheaves were so bound. 

Much of the wheat must be cut heavy and 
green because there is a liability to sudden 
storms or hail that will bury it in mud, or 
soften the ground and make it impossible 
to drag the reaper, or hot winds that sud- 
denly ripen the loose grain and shake it 
into the earth. So it is an important mat- 
ter to get the wheat out when it is anywhere 
near ready. I found that two of the girls 
were expecting to take the place of the de- 
parting hand, if I had not arrived. 

The Mennonite boy picked up two sheaves 
to my one at the beginning of the week. 
To-day I learn to handle two at a time and 
he immediately handles three at a time. He 
builds the heart of the sheaf. Then we add 
the outside together. He is always march- 
ing ahead and causing me to feel ashamed. 

The Kansas grasshopper makes himself 
friendly. He bites pieces out of the back 
of my shirt the shape and size of the ace 



106 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

of spades. Then he walks into the door he 
has made and loses himself. Then he has 
to be helped out, in one way or another. 

The old farmer, too stiff for work, comes 
out on his dancing pony and rides behind the 
new reaper. This reaper was bought only 
two days ago and he beams with pride upon 
it. It seems that he and his son almost 
swore, trying to tinker the old one. The 
farmer looks with even more pride upon 
the field, still a little green, but mostly 
golden. He dismounts and tests the grain, 
threshing it out in his hand, figuring the 
average amount in several typical heads. He 
stands off, and is guilty of an aesthetic thrill. 
He says of the sea of gold: "I wish I could 
have a photograph of that." (O eloquent 
word, for a Mennonite!) Then he plays at 
building half a dozen shocks, then goes home 
till late in the afternoon. We three are 
again masters of the field. 

We are in a level part of Kansas, not a 
rolling range as I found it further east. 



THE FIRST HARVEST 107 

The field is a floor. Hedges gradually faded 
from the landscape in counties several days' 
journey back, leaving nothing but unbroken 
billows to the horizon. But the hedges have 
been resumed in this region. Each time 
round the enormous field we stop at a break 
in the line of those untrimmed old thorn- 
trees. Here we rest a moment and drink 
from the water- jug. To keep from getting 
sunstruck I profanely waste the water, 
pouring it on my head, and down my neck 
to my feet. I came to this farm wearing 
a derby, and have had to borrow a slouch 
with a not-much- wider rim from the farmer. 
It was all the extra headgear available in 
this thrifty region. Because of that not- 
much-wider rim my face is sunburned all 
over every day. I have not yet received my 
wages to purchase my sombrero. 

As we go round the field, the Mennonite 
boy talks religion, or is silent. I have caught 
the spirit of the farm, and sing all the hymn- 
tunes I can remember. Sometimes the wind 



108 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

turns hot. Perspiration cannot keep up with 
evaporation. Our skins are dry as the 
dryest stubble. Then we stand and wait for 
a little streak of cool wind. It is pretty 
sure to come in a minute. "That's a nice 
air," says the boy, and gets to work. Once 
it was so hot all three of us stopped five 
minutes by the hedge. Then it was I told 
them the story of the hens I met just west 
of Emporia. 

I had met ten hens walking single-file into 
the town of Emporia. I was astonished to 
meet educated hens. Each one was swear- 
ing. I would not venture, I added, to repeat 
what they said. 

Not a word from the Mennonites. 

I continued in my artless way, showing 
how I stopped the next to the last hen, 
though she was impatient to go on. I in- 
quired "Where are you all travelling?" She 
said "To Emporia." And so I asked, "Why 
are you swearing so?" She answered, 



THE FIRST HARVEST 109 

"Don't you know about the Sunday-school 
picnic?" I paused in my story. 

No word from the Mennonites. One of 
them rose rather impatiently. 

I poured some water on my head and con- 
tinued: "I stopped the last hen. I asked: 
"Why are you swearing, sister? And what 
about the picnic ?" She replied: "These Em- 
poria people are going to give a Sunday- 
school picnic day after to-morrow. Mean- 
time all us hens have to lay devilled eggs." 

"We do not laugh at jokes about swear- 
ing," said the Mennonite driver, and climbed 
back on to his reaper. My partner strode 
solemnly out into the sun and began to pile 
sheaves. 

Each round we study our shadows on the 
stubble more closely, thrilled with the feel- 
ing that noon creeps on. And now, up the 
road we see a bit of dust and a rig. "No, it 
is not the woman we are looking for, but 
a woman with supplies for other harvesters. 
We work on and on, while four disappoint- 



110 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

ing rigs go by. At last appears a sunbonnet 
we know. Our especial Mennonite maid 
is sitting quite straight on the edge of the 
seat and holding the lines almost on a level 
with her chin. She drives through the field 
toward us. We motion her to the gap in the 
hedge. 

We unhitch, and lead the mules to the gap, 
where she joins us. With much high-mind- 
ed expostulation the men try to show the 
mules they should eat alfalfa and not hedge- 
thorns. The mules are at last tied out in the 
sun to a wheel of the wagon, away from 
temptation, with nothing but alfalfa near 
them. 

The meal is spread with delicacy, yet there 
is a heap of it. With a prayer of thanks- 
giving, sometimes said by Tilly, sometimes 
by one of the men, we begin to eat. To a 
man in a harvest-field a square meal is more 
thrilling than a finely-acted play. 

The thrill goes not only to the toes and the 
finger-tips, but to the utmost ramifications 



THE FIRST HARVEST 111 

of the spirit. Men indoors in offices, whose 
bodies actually require little, cannot think 
of eating enormously without thinking of 
sodden overeating, with condiments to 
rouse, and heavy meats and sweets to lull 
the flabby body till the last faint remnants 
of appetite have departed and the man is a 
monument of sleepy gluttony. 

Eating in a harvest field is never so. 
Every nerve in the famished body calls fran- 
tically for reinforcements. And the nerves 
and soul of a man are strangely alert to- 
gether. All we ate for breakfast turned to 
hot ashes in our hearts at eleven o'clock. I 
sing of the body and of the eternal soul, 
revived again! To feel life actually throb- 
bing back into one's veins, life immense in 
passion, pulse and power, is not over-eating. 

Tilly has brought us knives, and no forks. 
It would have been more appropriate if we 
had eaten from the ends of swords. We are 
finally recuperated from the fevers of the 



112 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

morning and almost strong enough for the 
long, long afternoon fight with the sun. 
Fresh water is poured from a big glittering 
can into the jugs we have sucked dry. Tilly 
reloads the buggy and is gone. After an- 
other sizzling douse of water without and 
within, our long afternoon pull commences. 
The sun has become like a roaring lion, 
and we wrestle with the sheaves as though 
we had him by the beard. The only thing 
that keeps up my nerve in the dizziness is 
the remembrance of the old Mennonite's 
proverb at breakfast that as long as a man 
can eat and sweat he is safe. My hands in- 
side my prickling gloves seem burning off. 
The wheat beards there are like red-hot 
needles. But I am still sweating a little in 
the chest, and the Mennonite boy is cheer- 
fully singing: 

"When I behold the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 
My richest gain I count but loss 
And pour contempt on all my pride." 



THE FIRST HARVEST 113 

Two-thirds round the field, methinks the jig 
is up. Then the sun is hidden by a friend of 
ours in the sky, just the tiniest sort of a 
cloud and we march on down the rows. The 
merciful little whiff of dream follows the 
sun for half an hour. 

The most terrible heat is at half -past two. 
Somehow we pull through till four o'clock. 
Then we say to ourselves: "We can stand 
this four-o'clock heat, because we have stood 
it hotter." 

'Tis a grim matter of comparison. We 
speed up a little and trot a little as the sun 
reaches the top of the western hedge. A bit 
later the religious hired man walks home to 
do the chores. I sing down the rows by 
myself. It is glorious to work now. The 
endless reiterations of the day have devel- 
oped a certain dancing rhythm in one's 
nerves, one is intoxicated with his own weari- 
ness and the conceit that comes with seizing 
the sun by the mane, like Sampson. 

It is now that the sun gracefully acknowl- 



114 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

edges his defeat. He shows through the 
hedge as a great blur, that is all. Then he 
becomes a mist-wrapped golden mountain 
that some fairy traveller might climb in en- 
chanted shoes. This sun of ours is no longer 
an enemy, but a fantasy, a vision and a 
dream. 

Now the elderly proprietor is back on his 
dancing pony. He is following the hurry- 
ing reaper in a sort of ceremonial fashion, 
delighted to see the wheat go down so fast. 
At last this particular field is done. We 
finish with a comic- tragedy. Some little 
rabbits scoot, panic-stricken, from the last 
few yards of still-standing grain. The old 
gentleman on horseback and his son afoot 
soon out-manoeuvre the lively creatures. We 
have rabbit for supper at the sacrifice of 
considerable Mennonite calm. 

It was with open rejoicing on the part 
of all that we finished the field nearest the 
house, the last one, by Saturday noon. The 
boy and I had our own special thrill in catch- 



THE FIRST HARVEST 115 

ing up with the reaper, which had passed by 
us so often in our rounds. As the square 
in mid-field grows smaller the reaper has to 
turn oftener, and turning uses up much 
more time than at first appears. 

The places where the armies of wheat- 
sheaves are marshalled are magic places, 
despite their sweat and dust. There is noth- 
ing small in the panorama. All the lines of 
the scene are epic. The binder-twine is in- 
visible, and has not altered the eternal classic 
form of the sheaf. There is a noble dignity 
and ease in the motion of a new reaper on a 
level field. A sturdy Mennonite devotee 
marching with a great bundle of wheat un- 
der each arm and reaching for a third makes 
a picture indeed, an essay on sunshine be- 
yond the brush of any impressionist. Each 
returning day while riding to the field, when 
one has a bit of time to dream, one feels 
these things. One feels also the essentially 
partriarchal character of the harvest. One 
thinks of the Book of Ruth, and the Jewish 



116 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

feasts of ingathering. All the new Testa- 
ment parables ring in one's ears, parables of 
sowing and reaping, of tares and good grain, 
of Bread and of Leaven and the story of 
the Disciples plucking corn. As one looks 
on the half -gathered treasure he thinks on 
the solemn words: "For the Bread of God 
is that which cometh down out of Heaven 
and giveth life unto the World," and the 
rest of that sermon on the Bread of Life, 
which has so many meanings. 

This Sunday before breakfast, I could 
fully enter into the daily prayers, that at 
times had appeared merely quaint to me, 
and in my heart I said "Amen" to the special 
thanksgiving the patriarch lifted up for the 
gift of the fruit of the land. I was happy 
indeed that I had had the strength to bear 
my little part in the harvest of a noble and 
devout household, as well as a hand in the 
feeding of the wide world. 

What I, a stranger, have done in this 
place, thirty thousand strangers are doing 



THE FIRST HARVEST 117 

just a little to the west. We poor tramps 
are helping to garner that which reestab- 
lishes the nations. If only for a little while, 
we have bent our backs over the splendid 
furrows, to save a shining gift that would 
otherwise rot, or vanish away. 

Thursday Afternoon, July Fourth, 
1912. In the shadow of a lonely windmill 
between Raymond and Ellinwood, Kansas. 

I arrived hot and ravenous at Raymond 
about eleven a.m. on this glorious Independ- 
ence Day, having walked twelve miles fac- 
ing a strange wind. At first it seemed fairly 
cool, because it travelled at the rate of an 
express train. But it was really hot and 
alkaline, and almost burnt me up. I had 
had for breakfast a cooky, some raisins and 
a piece of cheese, purchased with my book- 
let of rhymes at a grocery, ^y the time I 
reached Raymond I was fried and frantic. 

The streets were deserted. I gathered 
from the station-master that almost every- 



118 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

one had gone to the Dutch picnic in the 
grove near Ellinwood. The returns for the 
Johnson-Elynn fight were to be received 
there beneath the trees, and a potent variety 
of dry-state beverage was to flow free. The 
unveracious station-master declared this bev- 
erage was made of equal parts iron-rust, 
patent medicine and rough-on-rats, added 
to a barrel of brown rain-water. He ap- 
peared to be prejudiced against it. 

I walked down the street. Just as I had 
somehow anticipated, I spied out a certain 
type of man. He was alone in his restau- 
rant and I crouched my soul to spring. The 
only man left in town is apt to be a soft- 
hearted party. "Here, as sure as my name 
is tramp, I will wrestle with a defenceless 
fellow-being." 

Like many a restaurant in Kansas, it was 
a sort of farmhand's Saturday night para- 
dise. If a man cannot loaf in a saloon he 
will loaf in a restaurant. Then certain 
problems of demand and supply arise ac- 



THE FIRST HARVEST 119 

cording to circumstances and circumlocu- 
tions. 

I obtained leave for the ice-water with- 
out wrestling. I almost emptied the tank. 
Then, with due art, I offered to recite twenty- 
poems to the solitary man, a square meal to 
be furnished at the end, if the rhymes were 
sufficiently fascinating. 

Assuming a judicial attitude on the lunch- 
counter stool he put me in the arm-chair by 
the ice-chest and told me to unwind myself. 
As usual, I began with The Pi'oud Farmer, 
The Illinois Village and The Building of 
Springfield, which three in series contain 
my whole gospel, directly or by implication. 
Then I wandered on through all sorts of 
rhyme. He nodded his head like a man- 
darin, at the end of each recital. Then he 
began to get dinner. He said he liked my 
poetry, and he was glad I came in, for he 
would feel more like getting something to 
eat himself. I sat on and on by the ice- 
chest while he prepared a meal more heating 



120 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

than the morning wind or the smell of fire- 
crackers in the street. First, for each man, 
a slice of fried ham large enough for a 
whole family. Then French fried potatoes 
by the platterful. Then three fried eggs 
apiece. There was milk with cream on top 
to be poured from a big granite bucket as 
we desired it. There was a can of beans 
with tomato sauce. There was sweet apple- 
butter. There were canned apples. There 
was a pot of coffee. I moved over from the 
ice-chest and we talked and ate till half -past 
one. I began to feel that I was solid as an 
iron man and big as a Colossus of Rhodes. 
I would like to report our talk, but this letter 
must end somewhere. I agreed with my 
host's opinions on everything but the tem- 
perance question. He did not believe in 
total abstinence. On that I remained non- 
committal. Eating as I had, how could I 
take a stand against my benefactor even 
though the issue were the immortal one of 
man's sinful weakness for drink? The ham 



THE FIRST HARVEST 121 

and ice water were going to my head as it 
was. And I could have eaten more. I could 
have eaten a fat Shetland pony. 

My host explained that he also travelled 
at times, but did not carry poetry. He gave 
me much box-car learning. Then, curious 
to relate, he dug out maps and papers, and 
showed me how to take up a claim in Ore- 
gon, a thing I did not in the least desire to 
do. God bless him in basket and in store, 
afoot or at home. 

This afternoon the ham kept on frying 
within me, not uncomfortably. I stopped 
and drank at every windmill. Now it is 
about four o'clock in the afternoon and I 
am in the shadow of one more. I have found 
a bottle which just fits my hip pocket which 
I have washed and will use as a canteen 
henceforth. When one knows he has his 
drink with him, he does not get so thirsty. 

But I have put down little to show you 
the strange intoxication that has pervaded 
this whole day. The inebriating character 



122 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

of the air and the water and the intoxication 
that comes with the very sight of the wind- 
mills spinning alone, and the elation that 
comes with the companionship of the sun, 
and the gentleness of the occasional good 
Samaritans, are not easily conveyed in words. 
When one's spirit is just right for this sort 
of thing it all makes as good an Independ- 
ence Day as folks are having anywhere in 
this United States, even at Ellinwood. 

Thursday, July 5, 1912. In the office 
of the Ellinwood livery stable in the morn- 
ing. 

Everyone came home drunk from the 
Dutch picnic last night. Ellinwood roared 
and Ellinwood snorted. I reached the place 
from the east just as the noisy revellers ar- 
rived from the south. 

Ellinwood is an old German town full of 
bar-rooms, forced by the sentiment of the 
dry voters in surrounding territory to turn 
into restaurants, but only of late. The bar- 



THE FIRST HARVEST 128 

fixtures are defiantly retained. Ever and 
anon Ellinwood takes to the woods with 
malicious intent. 

Many of the citizens were in a mad-dog 
fury because Flynn had not licked Johnson, 
This town seems to be of the opinion that 
that battle was important. The proprietor 
of the most fashionable hotel monopolized 
the 'phone on his return from the woods^ 
He called up everybody in town. His con^ 
versation was always the same. "What'd 
ya think of the fight?" And without wait- 
ing for answer: "I'll bet one hundred thou- 
sand dollars that Flynn can lick Johnson in 
a fair fight. It's a disgrace to this nation 
that black rascal kin lay hands on a white 
man. I'll bet a hundred thousand dollars. 
. . . A hundred thousand dollars . .," 
etc. 

I sat a long time waiting for him to get 
through. At last I put in my petition at 
another hostelrie. This host was intoxicated, 
but gentle. In exchange for what I call the 



124 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

squarest kind of a meal I recited the most 
cooling verses I knew to a somewhat dis- 
tracted, rather alcoholic company of harvest 
hands. First I recited a poem in praise of 
Lincoln and then one in praise of the up- 
lifting influence of the village church. Then, 
amid qualified applause, I distributed my 
tracts, and retreated to this stable for the 
night. 

KANSAS 

0, I have walked in Kansas 
Through many a harvest field 
And piled the sheaves of glory there 
And down the wild rows reeled: 

Each sheaf a little yellow sun, 
A heap of hot-rayed gold; 
Each binder like Creation's hand 
To mould suns, as of old. 

Straight overhead the orb of noon 
Beat down with brimstone breath: 
The desert wind from south and west 
Was blistering flame and death. 



THE FIRST HARVEST 125 

Yet it was gay in Kansas, 
A-flghting that strong sun; 
And I and many a fellow-tramp 
Defied that wind and won. 

And we felt free in Kansas 
From any sort of fear, 
For thirty thousand tramps like us 
There harvest every year. 

She stretches arms for them to come. 

She roars for helpers then, 

And so it is in Kansas 

That tramps, one month, are men. 

We sang in burning Kansas 
The songs of Sabbath-school, 
The "Day Star" flashing in the East, 
The "Vale of Eden" cool. 

We sang in splendid Kansas 
"The flag that set us free" — 
That march of fifty thousand men 
With Sherman to the sea. 

We feasted high in Kansas 
And had much milk and meat. 
The tables groaned to give us power 
Wherewith to save the wheat. 



126 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Our beds were sweet alfalfa hay 
Within the barn-loft wide. 
The loft doors opened out upon 
The endless wheat-field tide. 

I loved to watch the wind-mills spin 
And watch that big moon rise. 
I dreamed and dreamed with lids half-shut, 
The moonlight in my eyes. 

For all men dream in Kansas 
By noonday and by night, 
By sunrise yellow, red and wild 
And moonrise wild and white. 

The wind would drive the glittering clouds, 
The cottonwoods would croon, 
And past the sheaves and through the leaves 
Came whispers from the moon. 



In Kansas: the Second and Third Harvest 

'TWO miles north of Great Bend. In 
the heart of the greatest wheat country 
in America, and in the midst of the harvest- 
time, Sunday, July 7, 1912. 

I am meditating on the ways of Destiny. 
It seems to me I am here, not altogether by 
chance. But just why I am here, time must 
reveal. 

Last Friday I had walked the ten miles 
from Ellinwood to Great Bend by 9 a.m. 
I went straight to the general delivery, where 
a package of tracts and two or three weeks' 
mail awaited me. I read about half through 
the letter-pile as I sat on a rickety bench in 
the public square. Some very loud-mouthed 
negroes were playing horse-shoe obstreper- 

127 



128 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

ously. I began to wish Flynn had whipped 
Johnson. I was thinking of getting away 
from there, when two white men, evidently 
harvesters, sat down near me and diluted the 
color scheme. 

One man said : "Harvest-wages this week 
are from two dollars and fifty cents up to 
four dollars. We are experienced men and 
worth three dollars and fifty cents." Then 
a German farmer came and negotiated with 
them in vain. He wanted to hold them down 
to three dollars apiece. He had his auto- 
mobile to take his crew away that morning. 

Then a fellow in citified clothes came to 
me and asked: "Can you follow a reaper 
and shock?" I said: "Show me the wheat." 
So far as I remember, it is the first time in 
my life anyone ever hunted me out and ashed 
me to work for him. He put me into his 
buggy and drove me about two miles north 
to this place, just the region John Hum- 
phrey told me to find, though he did not 
specify this farm. I was offered $2.50 and 



THE SECOND HARVEST 129 

keep, as the prophet foretold. The man 
who drove me out has put his place this year 
into the hands of a tenant who is my direct 
boss. I may not be able to last out, but all 
is well so far. I have made an acceptable 
hand, keeping up with the reaper by myself, 
and I feel something especial awaits me. 
But the reaper breaks down so often I do 
not know whether I can keep up with it 
without help when it begins going full-speed. 

These people do not attend church like 
the Mennonites. The tenant wanted me to 
break the Sabbath and help him in the al- 
falfa to-day. He suggested that neither he 
nor I was so narrow-minded or superstitious 
as to be a "Sunday man." Besides he 
couldn't work the alfalfa at all without one 
more hand. I did not tell him so, but I felt 
I needed all Sunday to catch up on my 
tiredness. I suspect that my refusal to vio- 
late the Sabbath vexed him. 

There has been a terrible row of some kind 
going on behind the barn all afternoon. 



130 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Maybe he is working off his vexation. At 
last the tenant's wife has gone out to "see 
about that racket." Now she comes in. 
She tells me they have been trying to break 
a horse. 

The same farm, two miles north of Great 
Bend, July 8, 1912. 

How many times in the counties further 
back I have asked with fear and misgiving 
for permission to work in the alfalfa, and 
have been repulsed when I confessed to the 
lack of experience ! And now this morning 
I have pitched alfalfa hay with the best of 
them. We had to go to work early while 
the dew softened the leaves. It is a kind 
of clover. Once perfectly dry, the leaves 
crumble off when the hay is shaken. Then 
we must quit. The leaves are the nourish- 
ing part. 

The owner of the place, the citified party 
who drove me out here the other day and 
who is generally back in town, was on top 



THE SECOND HARVEST 181 

of that stack this morning, his collar off , 
his town shirt and pants somewhat the worse 
for the exertion. He puffed like a porpoise, 
for he was putting in place all the hay we 
men handed up to him. We lifted the al- 
falfa in a long bundle, using our three forks 
at one time. We worked like drilled sol- 
diers, then went in to early dinner. 

This is a short note written while the 
binder takes the necessary three turns round 
the new wheatfleld that the tenant's brother 
and I are starting to conquer this afternoon. 
Three swaths of four bundles each must be 
cut, then I will start on my rounds, piling 
them into shocks of twelve bundles each. 

I am right by the R. F. D. box that goes 
with this farm. I will put up the little tin 
flag that signals the postman. One of the 
four beasts hitched to the reaper is a broncho 
colt who came dancing to the field this after- 
noon, refusing to keep his head in line with 
the rest of the steeds, and, as a consequence, 
pulling the whole reaper. It transpires that 



132 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

the row in the horselot Sunday was caused 
by this colt. He jumped up and left his 
hoof -print on the chest of the man now driv- 
ing him. So the two men tied him up and 
beat him all afternoon with a double-tree, 
cursing him between whacks, lashing them- 
selves with Kansas whisky to keep up steam. 
Yet he comes dancing to the field. 

On the farm two miles north of Great 
Bend, Wednesday evening, July 10, 1912. 

I must write you a short note to-night 
while the rest are getting ready for supper. 
I will try to mail it to-morrow morning on 
the way to the wheat. Let me assure you 
that your letter will be heeded. I know 
pretty well, by this time, what I can stand, 
but if I feel the least bit unfit I will not go 
into the sun. That is my understanding 
with the tenant who runs the farm. I can 
eat and sweat like a Mennonite. I sleep like 
a top and wake up fresh as a little daisy. 
So far I have gone dancing to the field as 



THE SECOND HARVEST 133 

the broncho did. But the broncho is a poor 
illustration. He is dead. 

The broncho was the property of a little 
boy, the son of the man who owns the farm. 
The little boy had started with a lamb and 
raised it, then sold it for chickens, increas- 
ing his capital by trading and feeding till 
it was all concentrated to buy this colt. Then 
he and his people moved to town and left 
the colt, just at the breaking age, to be 
trained for a boy's pet by these men. Since 
he became obstreperous, they thought hitch- 
ing him to the reaper would cure him, leav- 
ing a draught-horse in the barn to make 
place for the unruly one. 

The tenant's brother, who drove the reap- 
er, sent word to the little boy he had not the 
least idea what ailed Dick. He hinted to 
me later that whatever killed him must have 
come from some disease in his head. 

Yes, it came from his head. That double- 
tree and that pitchfork handle probably 
missed his ribs once or twice and hit him 



134 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

somewhere around his eyes, in the course of 
the Sabbath afternoon services. Two whis- 
ky-lashed colt-breakers can do wonders with- 
out trying. I have been assured that this is 
the only way to subdue the beasts, that law 
and order must assert themselves or the 
whole barnyard will lead an industrial re- 
bellion. It is past supper now. I have been 
writing till the lamp is dim. I must go to 
my quilts in the hay. 

To-day was the only time the reaper did 
not break down every half hour for repairs. 
So it was one continuous dance for me and 
my friend the broncho till about three o'clock 
in the afternoon, when the sun really did its 
best. Then the broncho went crazy. He 
shoved his head over the backs of two mules 
twice his size, and almost pushed them into 
the teeth of the sickle. 

He was bleeding at the mouth and his 
eyes almost popped out of his head. He had 
hardly an inch of hide that was whole, and 
his raw places were completely covered with 



THE SECOND HARVEST 135 

Kansas flies. And the hot winds have made 
the flies so ravenous they draw blood from 
the back of the harvester's hand the moment 
they alight. 

The broncho began to kick in all four 
directions at once. He did one good thing. 
He pulled the callouses off the hands of the 
tenant's brother, the driver, who still gripped 
the lines but surrendered his pride and 
yelled for me to help. I am as afraid of 
bronchos and mules as I am of buzz saws. 
Yet we separated the beasts somehow, the 
mules safely hitched to the fence, the broncho 
between us, held by two halter-ropes. 

There was no reasoning with Dick. He 
was dying, and dying game. One of the 
small boys appeared just then and carried 
the alarm. Soon a more savage and in- 
domitable man with a more eloquent tongue, 
the tenant himself, had my end of the rope. 
But not the most formidable cursing could 
stop Dick from bleeding at the mouth. 
Later the draught horse whose place he had 



136 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

taken was brought over from his pleasant 
rest in the barn and the two were tied head 
to head. The lordly tenant started to lead 
them toward home. But Dick fell down 
and died as soon as he reached a patch of 
unploughed prairie grass, which, I think, 
was the proper end for him. The peaceful 
draught horse was put in his place. 

The reaper went back to work. The 
reaper cut splendidly the rest of this after- 
noon. As for me I never shocked wheat with 
such machine-like precision. I went at a dog- 
trot part of the time, and almost caught 
up with the machine. 

The broncho should not have been called 
Dick. He should have been called Daniel 
Boone, or Davy Crockett or Custer or Rich- 
ard, yes, Richard the Lion-Hearted. He 
came dancing to the field this morning, be- 
tween the enormous overshadowing mules, 
and dancing feebly this noon. He pulled 
the whole reaper till three o'clock. I remem- 
ber I asked the driver at noon what made 



THE SECOND HARVEST 187 

the broncho dance. He answered: "The 
flies on his ribs, I suppose." 

I fancy Dick danced because he was made 
to die dancing, just as the Spartans rejoiced 
and combed their long hair preparing to 
face certain death at Thermopylae. 

I think I want on my coat of arms a 
broncho, rampant. 

Thursday, July 11, 1912. Great Bend, 
Kansas. 

Yesterday I could lift three moderate- 
sized sheaves on the run. This morning I 
could hardly lift one, walking. This noon 
the foreman of the ranch, the man who, with 
his brother, disciplined the broncho, was furi- 
ously angry with me, because, as I plainly 
explained, I was getting too much sun and 
wanted a bit of a rest. He inquired, "Why 
didn't you tell me two days ago you were 
going to be overcome by the heat, so I could 
have had a man ready to take your place?" 
Also, "It's no wonder dirty homeless men 



188 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

are walking around the country looking for 
jobs." Also, a little later: "I have my opin- 
ion of any man on earth who is a quitter." 

But I kept my serenity and told him that 
under certain circumstances I was apt to be 
a quitter, though, of course, I did not like 
to overdo the quitting business. I remained 
unruffled, as I say, and handed him and his 
brother copies of The Gospel of Beauty 
and Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread and 
bade them good-bye. Then I went to town 
and told the local editor on them for their 
horse-killing, which, I suppose, was two- 
faced of me. 

The tenant's attitude was perfectly ab- 
surd. Hands are terribly scarce. A half 
day's delay in shocking that wheat would not 
have hurt it, or stopped the reaper, or al- 
tered any of the rest of the farm routine. 
He fired me without real hope of a substi- 
tute. I was working for rock-bottom wages 
and willing to have them docked all he 



THE SECOND HARVEST 139 

pleased if he would only give me six hours 
to catch up in my tiredness. 

Anyway, here I am in the Saddlerock 
Hotel, to which I have paid in advance a bit 
of my wages, in exchange for one night's 
rest. I enclose the rest to you. I will start 
out on the road to-morrow, bathed, clean, 
dead broke and fancy free. I have made 
an effort to graduate from beggary into the 
respectable laboring class, which you have 
so often exhorted me to do. 

I shall try for employment again, as soon 
as I rest up a bit. I enjoyed the wheat and 
the second-hand reaper, and the quaintness 
of my employers and all till the death of 
Richard the Lion-Hearted. 

I am wondering whether I ought to be 
as bitter as I am against the horse-killers. 
We cannot have green fields just for bron- 
chos to gambol in, or roads where they can 
trot unharnessed and nibble by the way. We 
must have Law and Order and Discipline. 

But, thanks to the Good St. Francis who 



140 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

marks out my path for me, I start to-mor- 
row morning to trot unharnessed once again. 

Sunday, July 14, 1912. In front of the 
general store at Wright, Kansas, which 
same is as small as a town can get. 

I have been wondering why Destiny sent 
me to that farm where the horse-killers flour- 
ished. I suppose it was that Dick might 
have at least one mourner. All the world's 
heroes are heroes because they had the quali- 
ties of constancy and dancing gameness that 
brought him to his death. 

Some day I shall hunt up the right kind 
of a Hindu and pay him filthy gold and 
have him send the ghost of Dick to those 
wretched men. They will be unable to move, 
lying with eyes a-staring all night long. 
Dreadful things will happen in that room, 
dreadful things the Hindu shall devise after 
I have told him what the broncho endured. 
They shall wake in the morning, thinking it 
all a dream till they behold the horse-shoe 



THE THIRD HARVEST 141 

prints all over the counterpane. Then they 
will try to sit up and find that their ribs are 
broken — well, I will leave it to the Hindu. 
I have been waiting many hours at this 
town of Wright. To-day and yesterday I 
made seventy-six miles. Thirty-five of these 
miles I made yesterday in the automobile of 
the genial and scholarly Father A. P. Her- 
mann of Kinsley, who took me as far as 
that point. I have been loafing here at 
Wright since about four in the afternoon. 
It is nearly dark now. Dozens of harvest- 
ers, already engaged for the week, have been 
hanging about and the two stores have kept 
open to accommodate them. There is a man 
to meet me here at eight o'clock. I may 
harvest for him four days. I told him I 
would not promise for longer. He has 
taken the train to a station further east to 
try to get some men for all week. If he 
does not return with a full quota he will 
take me on. While I am perfectly willing 



142 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

to work for two dollars and a half, many 
hold out for three. 

The man I am waiting for overtook me 
two miles east of this place. He was hurry- 
ing to catch his train. He took me into his 
rig and made the bargain. He turned his 
horse over to me and raced for the last car 
as we neared the station. So here I am a 
few yards from the depot, in front of the 
general store, watching the horse of an utter 
stranger. Of course the horse isn't worth 
stealing, and his harness is half twine and 
wire. But the whole episode is so careless 
and free and Kansas-like. 

Most of the crowd have gone, and I am 
awfully hungry. I might steal off the har- 
ness in the dark, and eat it. Somehow I 
have not quite the nerve to beg where I ex- 
pect to harvest. I am afraid to try again 
in this fight with the sun, yet when a man 
overtakes me in the road and trusts me with 
his best steed and urges me to work for him, 
I hardly know how to refuse. 



THE THIRD HARVEST 148 

Sunday Afternoon, July 21, 1912. 
Loafing and dozing on my bed in the gran- 
ary on the farm near Wright, Kansas, where 
I have been harvesting a full week. 

The man I waited for last Sunday after- 
noon returned with his full quota of hands 
on the "Plug" train about nine o'clock. 
Where was I to sleep? I began to think 
about a lumber pile I had seen, when I dis- 
covered that five other farmers had climbed 
off that train. They were poking around in 
all the dark corners for men just like me. 
I engaged with a German named Louis Lix 
for the whole week, all the time shaking with 
misgivings from the memory of my last 
break-down. Here it is, Sunday, before I 
know it. Lix wants me back again next 
year, and is sorry I will not work longer. 
I have totalled about sixteen days of harvest- 
ing in Kansas, and though I sagged in the 
middle I think I have ended in fair style. 
Enclosed find all my wages except enough 
for one day's stay at Dodge City and three 



144 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

real hotel meals there — sherbet and cheese 
and crackers, and finger bowls at the end, 
and all such folly. Harvest eating is grand 
in its way but somehow lacks frills. Ah, 
if eating were as much in my letters as in 
my thoughts, this would be nothing but a 
series of menus! 

I have helped Lix harvest barley, oats and 
wheat, mainly wheat. This is the world of 
wheat. In this genial region one can stand 
on a soap-box and see nothing else to the 
horizon. Walking the Santa Fe Trail be- 
side the railroad means walking till the 
enormous wheat-elevator behind one disap- 
pears because of the curvature of the earth, 
like the ships in the geography picture, and 
walking on and on till finally in the west the 
top of another elevator appears, being grad- 
ually revealed because this earth is not flat 
like a table, but, as the geography says, 
curved like an apple or an orange. 

In these fields, instead of working a 
reaper with a sickle eight feet long, they 



THE THIRD HARVEST 145 

work a header with a twelve-foot sickle. In- 
stead of four horses to this machine, there 
are six. Instead of one man or two follow- 
ing behind to the left of the driver to pile 
sheaves into shocks, a barge, a most copious 
slatted receptacle, drives right beside the 
header, catching the unbound wheat which 
is thrown up loosely by the machine. One 
pitchfork man in the barge spreads this cat- 
aract of headed wheat so a full load can be 
taken in. His partner guides the team, 
keeping precisely with the header. 

But these two bargemen do not complete 
the outfit. Two others with their barge or 
"header-box" come up behind as soon as the 
first box starts over to the stack to be un- 
loaded. Here the sixth man, the stacker, 
receives it, and piles it into a small moun- 
tain nicely calculated to resist cyclones. The 
green men are broken in as bargemen. The 
stacker is generally an old hand. 

Unloading the wheat is the hardest part 
of the bargeman's work. His fork must 



146 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

be full and he must be fast. Otherwise his 
partner, who takes turns driving and fill- 
ing, and who helps to pitch the wheat out, 
will have more than half the pitching to do. 
And all the time will be used up. Neither 
man will have a rest-period while waiting 
for the other barge to come up. This rest- 
period is the thing toward which we all 
wrestle. If we save it out we drink from 
the water-jugs in the corner of the wagon. 
We examine where the grasshoppers have 
actually bitten little nicks out of our pitch- 
fork handles, nicks that are apt to make 
blisters. We tell our adventures and, when 
the header breaks down, and must be 
tinkered endlessly, and we have a grand 
rest, the stacker sings a list of the most 
amazing cowboy songs. He is a young man, 
yet rode the range here for seven years be- 
fore it became wheat-country. One day 
when the songs had become hopelessly, 
prosaically pornographic I yearned for a 



THE THIRD HARVEST 147 

change. I quoted the first stanza of Ata- 
lanta's chorus: 

"When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, 
The mother of months, in meadow or plain, 
Fills the shadows and windy places 
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain " 

The stacker asked for more. I finished 
the chorus. Then I repeated it several times, 
while the header was being mended. We 
had to get to work. The next morning when 
my friend climbed into our barge to ride 
to the field he began: 

" 'When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, 
The mother of months, in meadow or plain, 
Fills the shadows ' 

"Dammit, what's the rest of it? I've been 
trying to recite that piece all night." 

Now he has the first four stanzas. And 
last evening he left for Dodge City to stay 
overnight and Sunday. He was resolved to 
purchase Atalanta in Calydon and find in 



148 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

the Public Library The Lady of Shallot and 
The Blessed Damozel, besides paying the 
usual visit to his wife and children. 

Working in a header-barge is fun, more 
fun than shocking wheat, even when one is 
working for a Mennonite boss. The crew 
is larger. There is occasional leisure to be 
social. There is more cool wind, for one 
is higher in the air. There is variety in the 
work. One drives about a third of the time, 
guides the wheat into the header a third of 
the time and empties the barge a third of 
the time. The emptying was the back- 
breaking work. 

And I was all the while fearful, lest, from 
plain awkwardness, or shaking from weari- 
ness, I should stick some man in the eye with 
my pitchfork. But I did not. I came 
nearer to being a real harvester every day. 
The last two days my hands were so hard 
I could work without gloves, this despite the 
way the grasshoppers had chewed the fork- 
handle. 



THE THIRD HARVEST 149 

Believe everything you have ever heard of 
the Kansas grasshoppers. 

The heights of the header-barge are 
dramatically commanding. Kansas appears 
much larger than when we are merely stand- 
ing in the field. We are just as high as 
upon a mountain-peak, for here, as there, 
we can see to the very edges of the eternities. 

Now let me tell you of a new kind of 
weather. 

Clouds thicken overhead. The wind turns 
suddenly cold. We shiver while we work. 
We are liable in five minutes to a hailstorm, 
a terrific cloudburst or a cyclone. The 
horses are unhitched. The barges are tied 
end to end. And still the barges may be 
blown away. They must be anchored even 
more safely. The long poles to lock the 
wheels are thrust under the bed through the 
spokes. It has actually been my duty to put 
this pole in the wheels every evening to keep 
the barges from being blown out of the 
barn-lot at night. Such is the accustomed 



150 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

weather excitement in Kansas. Just now 
we have excitement that is unusual. But 
as the storm is upon us it splits and passes 
to the north and south. There is not a drop 
of rain. 

We are at work again in ten minutes. In 
two hours the sky is clear and the air is hot 
and alkaline. And ten thousand grasshop- 
pers are glad to see that good old hot wind 
again, you may believe. They are preening 
themselves, each man in his place on the slats 
of the barge. They are enjoying their chew- 
ing tobacco the same as ever. 

Wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat! States and 
continents and oceans and solar-systems of 
wheat! We poor ne'er-do-weels take our 
little part up there in the header half way 
between the sky and the earth, and in 
the evening going home, carrying Mister 
Stacker-Man in our barge, we sing Sweet 
Rosy O'Qra&y and the Battle Hymn of the 
Republic. And the most emphatic and un- 
adulterated tramp among us harvesters, a 



THE THIRD HARVEST 151 

giant Swiss fifty years old, gives the yodel 
he learned when a boy. 

This is a German Catholic family for 
which I have been working. We have had 
grace before and after every meal, and we 
crossed ourselves before and after every 
meal, except the Swiss, who left the table 
early to escape being blest too much. 

My employers are good folk, good as the 
Mennonites. My boss was absolutely on the 
square all the week, as kind as a hard-work- 
ing man has time to be. It gave me great 
satisfaction to go to Mass with him this 
morning. Though some folks talk against 
religion, though it sometimes appears to be 
a nuisance, after weighing all the evidence 
of late presented, I prefer a religious 
farmer. 



152 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

HERE'S TO THE SPIRIT OF FIRE 

Here's to the spirit of fire, wherever the flame is un- 
furled, 
In the sun, it may be, as a torch, to lead on and 

enlighten the world; 
That melted the glacial streams, in the day that no 

memories reach, 
That shimmered in amber and shell and weed on the 

earliest beach; 
The genius of love and of life, the power that will 

ever abound, 
That waits in the bones of the dead, who sleep till 

the judgment shall sound. 
Here's to the spirit of fire, when clothed in swift 

music it comes, 
The glow of the harvesting songs, the voice of the 

national drums; 
The whimsical, various fire, in the rhymes and ideas 

of men, 
Buried in boohs for an age, exploding and writhing 

again, 
And blown a red wind round the world, consuming 

the lies in its mirth, 
Then locked in dark volumes for long, and buried like 

coal in the earth. 
Here's to the comforting fire in the joys of the blind 

and the meek, 



THE THIRD HARVEST 153 

In the customs of letterless lands, in the thoughts 

of the stupid and weak. 
In the weariest legends they tell, in their cruellest, 

coldest belief, 
In the proverbs of counter or till, in the arts of the 

priest or the thief. 
Here's to the spirit of fire, that never the ocean can 

drown, 
That glows in the phosphorent wave, and gleams in 

the sea-rose's crown; 
That sleeps in the sunbeam and mist, that creeps as 

the wise can but know, 
A wonder, an incense, a whim, a perfume, a fear and 

a glow, 
Ensnaring the stars with a spell, and holding the 

earth in a net, 
Yea, filling the nations with prayer, wherever man's 

pathway is set. 



VI 



The End of the Road; Moonshine; and 
Some Proclamations 

August 1, 1912. Standing up at the 
Postoffice desk, Pueblo, Colorado. 

Several times since going over the Colo- 
rado border I have had such a cordial recep- 
tion for the Gospel of Beauty that my faith 
in this method of propaganda is reawak- 
ened. I confess to feeling a new zeal. But 
there are other things I want to tell in this 
letter. 

I have begged my way from Dodge City 
on, dead broke, and keeping all the rules 
of the road. I have been asked dozens of 
times by frantic farmers to help them at 
various tasks in western Kansas and eastern 
Colorado. I have regretfully refused all 

154 



THE END OF THE ROAD 155 

but half -day jobs, having firmly resolved 
not to harvest again till I have well started 
upon a certain spiritual enterprise, namely, 
the writing of certain new poems that have 
taken possession of me in this high altitude, 
despite the physical stupidity that comes 
with strenuous walking. Thereby hangs a 
tale that I have not room for here. 

Resolutely setting aside all recent won- 
ders, I have still a few impressions of the 
wheatfield to record. Harvesting time in 
Kansas is such a distinctive institution! 
Whole villages that are dead any other sea- 
son blossom with new rooming signs, fifty 
cents a room, or when two beds are in a 
room, twenty-five cents a bed. The eating 
counters are generally separate from these. 
The meals are almost uniformly twenty-five 
cents each. The fact that Kansas has no 
bar-rooms makes these shabby food-sodden 
places into near-taverns, the main assembly 
halls for men wanting to be hired, or those 
spending their coin. Famous villages where 



156 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

an enormous amount of money changes 
hands in wages and the sale of wheat-crops 
are thus nothing but marvellous lines of 
dirty restaurants. In front of the dingy 
hotels are endless ancient chairs. Summer 
after summer fidgety, sun-fevered, sticky 
harvesters have gossiped from chair to chair 
or walked toward the dirty band-stand in 
the public square, sure, as of old, to be en- 
countered by the anxious farmer, making 
up his crew. 

A few harvesters are seen, carrying their 
own bedding; grasshopper bitten quilts with 
all their colors flaunting and their cotton 
gushing out, held together by a shawl-strap 
or a rope. Almost every harvester has a 
shabby suit-case of the paste-board variety 
banging round his ankles. When wages are 
rising the harvester, as I have said before, 
holds out for the top price. The poor farmer 
walks round and round the village half a 
day before he consents to the three dollars. 
Stacker's wages may be three to five simo- 



THE END OF THE ROAD 157 

leons and the obdurate farmer may have 
to consent to the five lest his wheat go to 
seed on the ground. It is a hard situation 
for a class that is constitutionally tightwad, 
often wisely so. 

The roundhouses, water tanks, and all 
other places where men stealing freight rides 
are apt to pass, have enticing cards tacked 
on or near them by the agents of the mayors 
of the various towns, giving average wages, 
number of men wanted, and urging all har- 
vesters good and true to come to some par- 
ticular town between certain dates. The 
multitude of these little cards keeps the har- 
vester on the alert, and, as the saying is: 
"Independent as a hog on ice." 

To add to the farmer's distractions, still 
fresher news comes by word of mouth that 
three hundred men are wanted in a region 
two counties to the west, at fifty cents more 
a day. It sweeps through the harvesters' 
hotels, and there is a great banging of suit- 
cases, and the whole town is rushing for the 



158 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

train. Then there is indeed a nabbing of 
men at the station, and sudden surrender on 
the part of the farmers, before it is too late. 

Harvesting season is inevitably placarded 
and dated too soon in one part of the State, 
and not soon enough in another. Kansas 
weather does not produce its results on 
schedule. This makes not one, but many 
hurry-calls. It makes the real epic of the 
muscle-market. 

Stand with me at the station. Behold 
the trains rushing by, hour after hour, 
freight-cars and palace cars of dishevelled 
men! The more elegant the equipage the 
more do they put their feet on the seats. 
Behold a saturnalia of chewing tobacco and 
sunburn and hairy chests, disturbing the 
primness and crispness of the Santa Fe, 
jostling the tourist and his lovely daughter. 

They are a happy-go-lucky set. They 
have the reverse of the tightwad's vices. The 
harvester, alas, is harvested. Gamblers lie 
in wait for him. The scarlet woman has her 



THE END OF THE ROAD 159 

pit digged and ready. It is fun for the 
police to lock him up and fine him. No 
doubt he often deserves it. I sat half an 
afternoon in one of these towns and heard 
the local undertaker tell horrible stories of 
friendless field hands with no kinsfolk any- 
where discoverable, sunstruck and buried in 
a day or so by the county. One man's story 
he told in great detail. The fellow had com- 
plained of a headache, and left the field. He 
fell dead by the roadside on the way to the 
house. He was face downward in an ant 
hill. He was eaten into an unrecognizable 
mass before they found him at sunset. The 
undertaker expatiated on how hard it was 
to embalm such folks. It was a discourse 
marshalled with all the wealth of detail one 
reads in The Facts in the Case of M. Val- 
demar. 

The harvester is indeed harvested. He 
gambles with sunstroke, disease and damna- 
tion. In one way or another the money 
trickles from his loose fingers, and he drifts 



160 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

from the wheat in Oklahoma north to the 
wheat in Nebraska. He goes to Canada to 
shock wheat there as the season recedes, and 
then, perhaps, turns on his tracks and makes 
for Duluth, Minnesota, we will say. He 
takes up lumbering. Or he may make a 
circuit of the late fruit crops of Colorado 
and California. He is, pretty largely, so 
much crude, loose, ungoverned human 
strength, more useful than wise. Looked 
at closely, he may be the boy from the 
machine-shop, impatient for ready money, 
the farmer failure turned farm-hand, the 
bank-clerk or machine-shop mechanic tired 
of slow pay, or the college student on a 
lark, in more or less incognito. He may 
be the intermittent criminal, the gay-cat or 
the travelling religious crank, or the futile 
tract-distributer. 

And I was three times fraternally ac- 
costed by harvesters who thought my oil- 
cloth package of poems was a kit of 



THE END OF THE ROAD 161 

burglar's tools. It is a system of breaking 
in, I will admit. 



A STORY LEFT OUT OF THE 
LETTERS 

This ends the section of my letters home 
that in themselves make a consecutive story. 
But to finish with a bit of a nosegay, and 
show one of the unexpected rewards of 
troubadouring, let me tell the tale of the 
Five Little Children Eating Mush. 

One should not be so vain as to recount a 
personal triumph. Still this is a personal 
triumph. And I shall tell it with all pride 
and vanity. Let those who dislike a con- 
ceited man drop the book right here. 

I had walked all day straight west from 
Rocky Ford. It was pitch dark, threatening 
rain — the rain that never comes. It was 
nearly ten o'clock. At six I had entered a 
village, but had later resolved to press on to 
visit a man to whom I had a letter of intro- 



162 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

duction from my loyal friend Dr. Barbour 
of Rocky Ford. 

There had been a wash-out. I had to walk 
around it, and was misdirected by the good 
villagers and was walking merrily on toward 
nowhere. Around nine o'clock I had been 
refused lodging at three different shanties. 
But from long experience I knew that some- 
thing would turn up in a minute. And 
it did. 

I walked right into the fat sides of a big 
country hotel on that interminable plain. It 
was not surrounded by a village. It was 
simply a clean hostelrie for the transient 
hands who worked at irrigating in that re- 
gion. 

I asked the looming figure I met in the 
dark: "Where is the boss of this place?" 

"I am the boss." He had a Scandinavian 
twist to his tongue. 

"I want a night's lodging. I will give in 
exchange an entertainment this evening, or 
half a day's work to-morrow." 



THE END OF THE ROAD 163 

"Come in." 

I followed him up the outside stairway to 
the dining-room in the second story. There 
was his wife, a woman who greeted me 
cheerfully in the Scandinavian accent. She 
was laughing at her five little children who 
were laughing at her and eating their mush 
and milk. 

Presumably the boarders had been de- 
layed by their work, and had dined late. 
The children were at it still later. 

They were real Americans, those little 
birds. And they had memories like parrots, 
as will appear. 

"Wife," said the landlord, "here is a man 
that will entertain us to-night for his keep, 
or work for us to-morrow. I think we will 
take the entertainment to-night. Go ahead, 
mister. Here are the kids. Now listen, 
kids." 

To come out of the fathomless, friendless 
dark and, almost in an instant, to look into 
such expectant fairy faces! They were 



164 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

laughing, laughing, laughing, not in mock- 
ery, but companionship. I recited every 
child-piece I had ever written — (not many) . 

They kept quite still till the end of each 
one. Then they pounded the table for more, 
with their tin spoons and their little red 
fists. 

So, with misgivings, I began to recite 
some of my fairy-tales for grown-ups. I 
spoke slowly, to make the externals of each 
story plain. The audience squealed for 
more. ... I decided to recite six jingles 
about the moon, that I had written long ago : 
How the Hyaena said the Moon was a 
Golden Skull, and how the Shepherd Dog 
contradicted him and said it was a Candle 
in the Sky — and all that and all that. 

The success of the move was remarkable 
because I had never pleased either grown 
folks or children to any extent with those 
verses. But these children, through the ac- 
cumulated excitements of a day that I knew 



THE END OF THE ROAD 165 

nothing about, were in an ecstatic imagina- 
tive condition of soul that transmuted every- 
thing. 

The last of the series recounted what 
Grandpa Mouse said to the Little Mice on 
the Moon question. I arranged the ketchup 
bottle on the edge of the table for Grandpa 
Mouse. I used the salts and peppers for the 
little mice in circle round. I used a black 
hat or so for the swooping, mouse-eating 
owls that came down from the moon. Hav- 
ing acted out the story first, I recited it, 
slowly, mind you. Here it is : 

WHAT GRANDPA MOUSE SAID 

"The moon's a holy owl-queen: 
She keeps them in a jar 
Under her arm till evening, 
Then sallies forth to war. 

She pours the owls upon us: 
They hoot with horrid noise 
And eat the naughty mousie-girls 
And wicked mousie-boys. 



166 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

So climb the moon-vine every night 
And to the owl-queen pray: 
Leave good green cheese by moonlit trees 
For her to take away. 

And never squeak, my children, 
Nor gnaw the smoke-house door. 
The owl-queen then will then love us 
And send her birds no more." 

At the end I asked for my room and re- 
tired. I slept maybe an hour. I was awak- 
ened by those tireless little rascals racing 
along the dark hall and saying in horrible 
solemn tones, pretending to scare one an- 
other : 

"The moon's a holy owl-queen: 
She keeps them in a jar 
Under her arm till night, 
Then 'allies out to war! 
She sicks the owls upon us, 
They 'OOT with 'orrid noise 
And eat . . . the naughty boys, 
And the moon's a holy owl-queen! 
She keeps them in a JAR !" 



THE END OF THE ROAD 167 

And so it went on, over and over. 

Thereupon I made a mighty and a rash 
resolve. I renewed that same resolve in the 
morning when I woke. I said within myself 
"I shall write one hundred Poems on the 
Moon!" 

Of course I did not keep my resolve to 
write one hundred pieces ahout the moon. 
But here are a few of those I did write im- 
mediately after: 

THE FLUTE OF THE LONELY 

[To the tune of Gaily the Troubadour.] 

Faintly the ne'er-do-well 

Breathed through his flute: 

All the tired neighbor- folk, 

Hearing, were mute. 

In their neat doorways sat, 

Labors all done, 

Helpless, relaxed, o'er-wrought, 

Evening begun. 

None of them there beguiled 
Work-thoughts away, 



168 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Like to this reckless, wild 

Loafer by day. 

(Weeds in his flowers upgrown! 

Fences awry ! 

Rubbish and bottles heaped! 

Yard like a sty !) 

There in his lonely door, 
Leering and lean, 
Staggering, liquor-stained, 

Outlawed, obscene 

Played he his moonlight thought, 

Mastered his flute. 

All the tired neighbor-folk, 

Hearing, were mute. 

None but he, in that block, 

Knew such a tune. 

All loved the strain, and all 

Looked at the moon! 



THE SHIELD OF FAITH 

The full moon is the Shield of Faith, 
And when it hangs on high 

Another shield seems on my arm 
The hard world to defy. 



THE END OF THE ROAD 169 

Yea, when the moon has knighted me, 

Then every poisoned dart 
Of daytime memory turns away 

From my dream-armored heart. 

The full moon is the Shield of Faith: 

As long as it shall rise, 
I know that Mystery comes again, 

That Wonder never dies. 

I know that Shadow has its place, 

That Noon is not our goal, 
That Heaven has non-official hours 

To soothe and mend the soul; 

That witchcraft can be angel-craft 

And wizard deeds sublime; 
That utmost darkness bears a flower, 

Though long the budding-time. 



THE ROSE OF MIDNIGHT 

[What the Gardener's Daughter Said] 

The moon is now an opening flower, 

The sky a cliff of blue. 
The moon is now a silver rose; 

Her pollen is the dew. 



170 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

Her pollen is the mist that swings 

Across her face of dreams: 
Her pollen is the faint cold light 

That through the garden streams. 

All earth is hut a passion-flower 

With blood upon his crown. 
And what shall fill his failing veins 

And lift his head,, bowed down? 

This cup of peace, this silver rose 

Bending with fairy breath 
Shall lift that passion-flower, the earth, 

A million times from Death! 



THE PATH IN THE SKY 

I sailed a little shallop 
Upon a pretty sea 
In blue and hazy mountains, 
Scarce mountains unto me; 
Their summits lost in wonder, 
They wrapped the lake around, 
And when my shallop landed 
I trod on a vague ground, 

And climbed and climbed toward heaven, 
Though scarce before my feet 
I found one step unveiled there 



THE END OF THE ROAD 171 

The blue-haze vast, complete, 

Until I came to Zion 

The gravel paths of God: 

My endless trail pierced the thick veil 

To flaming flowers and sod. 

I rested, looked behind me 

And saw where I had been. 

My little lake. It was the moon. 

Sky-mountains closed it in. 



PROCLAMATIONS 

Immediately upon my return from my 
journey the following Proclamations were 
printed in Farm and Fireside^ through the 
great kindness of the editors, as another 
phase of the same crusade. 

A PROCLAMATION 
OF BALM IN GILEAD 

/"^O to the fields, O city laborers, till your 
wounds are healed. Forget the street- 
cars, the skyscrapers, the slums, the Marseil- 
laise song. 



172 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

We proclaim to the broken-hearted, still 
able to labor, the glories of the ploughed 
land. The harvests are wonderful. And 
there is a spiritual harvest appearing. A 
great agricultural flowering of art and song 
is destined soon to appear. Where corn and 
wheat are growing, men are singing the 
psalms of David, not the Marseillaise. 

You to whom the universe has become a 
blast-furnace, a coke-oven, a cinder-strewn 
freight-yard, to whom the history of all ages 
is a tragedy with the climax now, to whom 
our democracy and our flag are but play- 
things of the hypocrite, — turn to the soil, 
turn to the earth, your mother, and she will 
comfort you. Rest, be it ever so little, from 
your black broodings. Think with the 
farmer once more, as your fathers did. 
Revere with the farmer our centuries-old 
civilization, however little it meets the city's 
trouble. Revere the rural customs that have 
their roots in the immemorial benefits of 
nature. 



THE END OF THE KOAD 173 

With the farmer look again upon the 
Constitution as something brought by 
Providence, prepared for by the ages. Go 
to church, the cross-roads church, and say 
the Lord's Prayer again. Help them with 
their temperance crusade. It is a deeper 
matter than you think. Listen to the laugh- 
ter of the farmer's children. Know that 
not all the earth is a- weeping. Know that so 
long as there is black soil deep on the prairie, 
so long as grass will grow on it, we have a 
vast green haven. 

The roots of some of our trees are still in 
the earth. Our mountains need not to be 
moved from their places. Wherever there is 
tillable land, there is a budding and bloom- 
ing of old-fashioned Americanism, which the 
farmer is making splendid for us against 
the better day. 

There is perpetual balm in Gilead, and 
many city workmen shall turn to it and be 
healed. This by faith, and a study of the 
signs, we proclaim! 



174 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

PROCLAMATION 

Of the New Time for Farmers and the New 
New England 

T ET it be proclaimed and shouted over all 
the ploughlands of the United States 
that the same ripening that brought our first 
culture in New England one hundred years 
ago is taking place in America to-day. 
Every State is to have its Emerson, its 
Whittier, its Longfellow, its Hawthorne 
and the rest. 

Our Puritan farmer fathers in our 
worthiest handful of States waited long for 
their first group of burnished, burning 
lamps. From the landing of the Pilgrims 
in 1620 to the delivery of Emerson's ad- 
dress on the American Scholar was a weary 
period of gestation well rewarded. 

Therefore, let us be thankful that we have 
come so soon to the edge of this occasion, 
that the western farms, though scarcely set- 



THE END OF THE ROAD 175 

tied, have the Chautauqua, which is New 
England's old rural lecture course ; the tem- 
perance crusade, which is New England's 
abolitionism come again; the magazine mili- 
tant, which is the old Atlantic Monthly com- 
bined with the Free- Soil Newspaper under 
a new dress, and educational reform, which 
is the Yankee school-house made glorious. 

All these, and more, electrify the farm- 
lands. Things are in that ferment where 
many-sided Life and Thought are born. 

Because our West and South are richer 
and broader and deeper than New England, 
so much more worth while will our work be. 
We will come nearer to repeating the spirit 
of the best splendors of the old Italian vil- 
lages than to multiplying the prunes and 
prisms of Boston. 

The mystery-seeking, beauty-serving fol- 
lowers of Poe in their very revolt from 
democracy will serve it well. The Pan-wor- 
shipping disciples of Whitman will in the 
end be, perhaps, more useful brothers of the 



176 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

White Christ than all our coming saints. 
And men will not be infatuated by the writ- 
ten and spoken word only, as in New Eng- 
land. Every art shall have the finest devo- 
tion. 

Already in this more tropical California, 
this airier Colorado, this black-soiled Illinois, 
in Georgia, with her fire-hearted tradition 
of chivalry and her new and most romantic 
prosperity, men have learned to pray to the 
God of the blossoming world, men have 
learned to pray to the God of Beauty. They 
meditate upon His ways. They have begun 
to sing. 

As of old, their thoughts and songs begin 
with the land, and go directly back to the 
land. Their tap-roots are deep as those 
of the alfalfa. A new New England is 
coming, a New England of ninety million 
souls! An artistic Renaissance is coming. 
An America is coming such as was long ago 
prophesied in Emerson's address on the 



THE END OF THE ROAD 177 

American Scholar. This by faith, and a 
study of the signs, we proclaim! 



PROCLAMATION 

Of the New Village, and the New Country 
Community > as Distinct from the Village 

HP HIS is a year of bumper crops, of har- 
vesting festivals. Through the mists 
of the happy waning year, a new village 
rises, and the new country community, in 
visions revealed to the rejoicing heart of 
faith. 

And yet it needs no vision to see them. 
Walking across this land I have found 
them, little ganglions of life, promise of 
thousands more. The next generation will 
be that of the eminent village. The son of 
the farmer will be no longer dazzled and de- 
stroyed by the fires of the metropolis. He 
will travel, but only for what he can bring 
back. Just as his father sends half-way 



178 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

across the continent for good corn, or melon- 
seed, so he will make his village famous by 
transplanting and growing this idea or that. 
He will make it known for its pottery or 
its processions, its philosophy or its pea- 
cocks, its music or its swans, its golden roofs 
or its great union cathedral of all faiths. 
There are a thousand miscellaneous achieve- 
ments within the scope of the great-hearted 
village. Our agricultural land to-day holds 
the ploughboys who will bring these benefits. 
I have talked to these boys. I know them. 
I have seen their gleaming eyes. 

And the lonejy country neighborhood, as 
distinct from the village, shall make itself 
famous. There are river valleys that will 
be known all over the land for their tall men 
and their milk-white maidens, as now for 
their well-bred horses. There are mountain 
lands that shall cultivate the tree of knowl- 
edge, as well as the apple-tree. There are 
sandy tracts that shall constantly ripen red 
and golden citrus fruit, but as well, philoso- 



THE END OF THE ROAD 179 

phers comforting as the moon, and strength- 
giving as the sun. 

These communities shall have their proud 
circles. They shall have families joined 
hand in hand, to the end that new blood and 
new thoughts be constantly brought in, and 
no good force or leaven be lost. The coun- 
try community shall awaken illustrious. 
This by faith, and a study of the signs, we 
proclaim! 



PROCLAMATION 

Welcoming the Talented Children of the 
Soil 

"DECAUSE of their closeness to the 
earth, the men on the farms increase 
in stature and strength. 

And for this very reason a certain pro- 
portion of their children are being born with 
a finer strength. They are being born with 
all this power concentrated in their nerves. 



180 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

They have the magnificent thoughts that 
might stir the stars in their courses, were 
they given voice. 

Yea, in almost every ranch-house is born 
one flower-like girl or boy, a stranger among 
the brothers and sisters. Welcome, and a 
thousand welcomes, to these fairy change- 
lings ! They will make our land lovely. Let 
all of us who love God give our hearts to 
these His servants. They are born with eyes 
that weep themselves blind, unless there is 
beauty to look upon. They are endowed 
with souls that are self-devouring, unless 
they be permitted to make rare music; with 
a desire for truth that will make them mad 
as the old prophets, unless they be permitted 
to preach and pray and praise God in their 
own fashion, each establishing his own dream 
visibly in the world. 

The land is being jewelled with talented 
children, from Maine to California: souls 
dewy as the grass, eyes wondering and pas- 
sionate, lips that tremble. Though they be 



THE END OF THE ROAD 181 

born in hovels, they have slender hands, 
seemingly lost amid the heavy hands. They 
have hands that give way too soon amid the 
bitter days of labor, but are everlastingly 
patient with the violin, or chisel, or brush, 
or pen. 

All these children as a sacred charge are 
appearing, coming down upon the earth like 
manna. Yet many will be neglected as the 
too-abundant mulberry, that is left upon the 
trees. Many will perish like the wild straw- 
berries of Kansas, cut down by the roadside 
with the weeds. Many will be looked upon 
like an over-abundant crop of apples, too 
cheap to be hauled to market, often used as 
food for the beasts. There will be a great 
slaughter of the innocents, more bloody than 
that of Herod of old. But there will be a 
desperate hardy remnant, adepts in all the 
conquering necromancy of agricultural 
Song and democratic Craftsmanship. They 
will bring us our new time in its complete- 
ness. 



182 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

This by faith, and a study of the signs, 
we proclaim! 

PROCLAMATION 

Of the Coming of Religion, Equality and 
Beauty 

T N OUR new day, so soon upon us, for the 
first time in the history of Democracy, 
art and the church shall be hand in hand and 
equally at our service. Neither craftsman- 
ship nor prayer shall be purely aristocratic 
any more, nor at war with each other, nor 
at war with the State. The priest, the states- 
man and the singer shall discern one 
another's work more perfectly and give 
thanks to God. 

Even now our best churches are blossom- 
ing in beauty. Our best political life, what- 
ever the howlers may say, is tending toward 
equality, beauty and holiness. 

Political speech will cease to turn only 
upon the price of grain, but begin consider- 



THE END OF THE ROAD 183 

ing the price of cross-roads fountains and 
people's palaces. Our religious life will no 
longer trouble itself with the squabbles of 
orthodoxy. It will give us the outdoor choral 
procession, the ceremony of dedicating the 
wheat-field or the new-built private house to 
God. That politician who would benefit the 
people will not consider all the world 
wrapped up in the defence or destruction of 
a tariiF schedule. He will serve the public 
as did Pericles, with the world's greatest 
dramas. He will rebuild the local Acropolis. 
He will make his particular Athens rule by 
wisdom and philosophy, not trade alone. 
Our crowds shall be audiences, not hurrying 
mobs; dancers, not brawlers; observers, not 
restless curiosity-seekers. Our mobs shall 
becomes assemblies and our assemblies relig- 
ious ; devout in a subtle sense, equal in privi- 
lege and courtesy, delicate of spirit, a 
perfectly rounded democracy. 

All this shall come through the services of 
three kinds of men in wise cooperation: the 



184 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

priests, the statesmen and the artists. Our 
priests shall be religious men like St. Francis, 
or John Wesley, or General Booth, or Car- 
dinal Newman. They shall be many types, 
but supreme of their type. 

Our statesmen shall find their exemplars 
and their inspiration in Washington, Jeffer- 
son and Lincoln, as all good Americans 
devoutly desire. 

But even these cannot ripen the land with- 
out the work of men as versatile as William 
Morris or Leonardo. Our artists shall fuse 
the work of these other workers, and give 
expression to the whole cry and the whole 
weeping and rejoicing of the land. We 
shall have Shelleys with a heart for religion, 
Ruskins with a comprehension of equality. 

'Religion, equality and beauty! By these 
America shall come into a glory that shall 
justify the yearning of the sages for her 
perfection, and the prophecies of the poets, 
when she was born in the throes of Valley 
Forge. 



THE END OF THE ROAD 185 

This j by faith, and a study of the signs, 
we proclaim! 

EPILOGUE 

[Written to all young lovers about to set up homes 
of their own — but especially to those of some 
far-distant day, and those of my home-village] 

Lovers, lovers, listen to my call. 

Give me kind thoughts. I woo you on my Jcnees. 
Lovers, pale lovers, when the wheat grows tall, 

When willow trees are Eden's incense trees: — 

/ would be welcome as the rose in flower 
Or busy bird in your most secret fane. 

I would be read in your transcendent hour 

When book and rhyme seem for the most part vain. 

I would be read, the while you kiss and pray. 

I would be read, ere the betrothal ring 
Circles the slender finger and you say 

Words out of Heaven, while your pulses sing. 

lovers, be my partisans and build 

Each home with a great fire-place as is meet. 

When there you stand, with royal wonder filled, 
In bridal peace, and comradeship complete, 



186 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY 

While each dear heart beats like a fairy drum — 
Then burn a new-ripe wheat-sheaf in my name. 

Out of the fire my spirit-bread shall come 

And my soul's gospel swirl from that red flame. 






















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